AirPods Max or Bang & Olufsen: what the money actually buys in an over-ear headphone

Let me disarm the comparison before it does any damage. Both of these headphones are very good. Anyone telling you one of them is a disaster is usually trying to sell you the other, or has a video to monetise. The honest situation is duller and more useful: past a certain point in this category, you are no longer buying decibels of noise cancellation. You are buying an object, and a relationship with the rest of your devices. The two companies have made very different bets about which of those matters more, and the right answer depends almost entirely on which sort of person you are.

What Apple is actually selling

The AirPods Max are not really headphones in the way Bang & Olufsen would understand the word. They are a peripheral for the Apple ecosystem that happens to sit on your head. That sounds like a criticism; it is closer to the whole point. If your day moves between an iPhone, an iPad and a Mac, the Max follow you around with a kind of quiet servility that no rival has matched. A call arrives on the phone while you are watching something on the laptop, and the audio simply goes where your attention goes. No menu, no pairing dance, no holding a button until a light blinks in a colour you have to look up.

Spatial audio is the other genuine trick. I was prepared to dismiss it as a demo feature, and for music I still half do — but for films on a flight it earns its keep, giving a seat-back screen the illusion of a room. Add noise cancellation that remains among the best available as I write this, and the case for the Max writes itself, provided you live where Apple lives.

The costs are equally honest. They are heavy, and you notice. An hour is fine; a long-haul overnight is a negotiation between your neck and your entertainment. The case remains one of the stranger objects Apple has shipped — a sort of protective bra that guards the one part of the headphone least likely to be damaged. And the design has now aged through several years without meaningful revision, which Apple appears entirely unbothered by. To be fair, so am I. They still look better than most of what has been released since.

What Bang & Olufsen is actually selling

B&O’s bet is the opposite one: that a headphone at this price should feel like a possession rather than an accessory. Pick up a Beoplay H95 or the newer H100 and the difference is immediate and slightly unfair. Aluminium that has been machined rather than moulded, lambskin where Apple uses mesh, a dial that turns with the damped resistance of something from a watchmaker’s bench. Nothing about it is necessary. All of it registers, every single time you touch the thing, in the way a good pen registers against a functional one.

The part I find genuinely persuasive, though, is less romantic: B&O has made a habit of building headphones you can keep. Earpads that replace without a heat gun, parts you can actually obtain, and a stated posture — backed by their record of supporting decades-old kit — that the product should outlive its battery and its Bluetooth version. In a category where most flagships are designed to be landfill with a three-year fuse, that is not marketing garnish. It changes the arithmetic of what you are paying, because you are amortising the price over a different span of years.

The sound, such as it is

Here is where I disappoint anyone hoping for a winner. At this level, sound signature is taste, not specification. The B&O house sound is warmer and more indulgent — music presented the way their showrooms are lit. Apple’s tuning is more neutral, more studio-monitor in temperament, and its computational processing does clever things that purists distrust on principle. I have sat with both and enjoyed both, and I would not stake a dinner on picking them apart blind across a varied playlist. If a reviewer tells you one of them objectively destroys the other, ask what they are selling.

What you can honestly say is that they flatter different libraries. Jazz, vocals and anything acoustic bloom pleasantly on the B&O; the Max are the safer companion for a diet that swings from podcasts to film scores to whatever the algorithm serves at midnight. Neither will embarrass you. Neither is the reason to choose.

So who buys which

The AirPods Max buyer is deep in Apple, values the disappearance of friction above the presence of luxury, and mostly listens at a desk or on a plane rather than on a two-hour walk. For that person the Max are close to a default, and pretending otherwise is contrarianism.

The Bang & Olufsen buyer is someone for whom the object itself is part of the pleasure — the same instinct that chooses a mechanical watch knowing full well the phone keeps better time. They may not even be an Apple household, in which case half the Max’s appeal evaporates on contact. They plan to own the things for a decade, and B&O is one of very few makers that treats that ambition as reasonable rather than eccentric.

If you recognise yourself clearly in one of those paragraphs, you already have your answer and I have merely delayed you.

The quiet third answer

And if you recognise yourself in neither — if you simply want excellent over-ears without joining anyone’s congregation — let me offer the option nobody’s marketing department will: last year’s model of either. Headphones do not improve the way phones do. The previous generation of a flagship is usually nearly indistinguishable in daily use, discounted by the simple passage of a product cycle, and entirely free of the anxiety that something newer is imminent, because it already happened and it barely mattered. I say this as someone who has paid full launch price more than once and would struggle, under oath, to tell you what it bought me. The most sophisticated purchase in this category is very often the least fashionable one.