Phil's Superpower of Enthusiasm

[Tl;dr: I really like the AirPodsPro Gen 2. I didn't want to. But damn, Apple figured some things out.] Scores: Cost-agnostic: 10 out of 10 Denalis Cost-sensitive: 9 out of 10 Denalis. [Update 1/20/24: after more than a year, I thought it was worth briefly revisiting the AirPods Pro 2. They're ... still great. They more or less live in my pants pocket, and when I recently thought that I'd finally misplaced them, I immediately went to Costco and bought another pair (in my defense, they were like $80 off on sale). I found my original pair, but I'm holding on to the second as a backup. The new version is identical in almost every way to the version that I originally reviewed, with the exception of having swapped the Lightning charging port on the case to a USB-C port to match the new generation of iPhones (and apparently they added some support for the new Apple VR device which will mean nothing to me). The sound is still really, really good. To the point where I've st...

[Tl;dr: The Apple AirPods Max are a really good set of headphones with a rich feature set, broad utility, and all-around good sound. They do have a few flaws, and they’re REALLY expensive. I probably wouldn’t pay MSRP for them right now given the other options out there, but they’re still a really well-designed and built piece of hardware that are easy for people already in the Apple ecosystem. Scores: Cost-agnostic: 8 out of 10 Denalis Cost-sensitive: 6 out of 10 Denalis.] Sound. The sound is deep and rich, with really impressive bass and sub-bass response for a headphone. It’s still weird to hear the low bass rumble clearly without feeling it in my chest, but the response is nimble and crisp, with very little lagging or blurring even during sections with rapid movement (like Massive Attack’s “Paradise Circus”). It even does a pretty good job of reproducing some intentionally-mastered splatter (like in Robert Glasper’s “Treal” (ft. Yasiin Bey)). That said, the bass is a little punchy...