Many people are asking why Apple’s newly-released over-the-ear headphones — the AirPods Max — cost $549. CNN is quick to point out that by comparison, the iPhone SE starts at $399, and other high-end headphones like Bose’s Noise-Cancelling Headphones 700 and Beats Studio 3 cost $339 and $349 respectively.
While media coverage for the AirPods Max has focused on the big price tag, what most people don’t realize is that these headphones really are different. In a word, they are smarter. They have enough computing power within them to do what other headphones cannot do because they are built around Apple’s H1 chip — a 10-core processor capable of 9 billion operations per second in each ear cup as well as “advanced software to power computational audio” (Apple News Release on 12/8/20).
We previously wrote about how all hardware will eventually be cloud-controlled. Another emerging trend, which Apple’s AirPod Max is leading for headphones, is that more and more hardware will have its own processing ability. This will allow hardware devices to participate in local mesh data communication networks and collaborate with each other while also feeding data to their “motherships.”
Another example is Sonos speakers. They do so well compared to “dumb” Bluetooth speakers because each of their speakers has its own little computer inside allowing them to do clever tricks like syncing music perfectly between them to avoid weird echoes or reverb. And now Apple is doing some of its own clever tricks with these new headphones and other headphone makers will need to catch up.
In the not so distant future more of our devices will become increasingly self-sufficient with their own processing power and software so that any one of them could be our chosen interface to all our apps at any given time. Eventually, we will be able to check our to-do list with audio from headphones and seamlessly switch to our laptop and/or perform data entry on our iPhone. The biggest challenge we have right now with technology is that our interface to it is so slow. For example, I was able to conceive of this idea in a few seconds, but it took me several minutes to type it out because the bandwidth of typing with your fingers is tediously slow. I believe that we will soon be able to talk to software while at the same time interacting with it using more traditional input devices like keyboards and mice; smart device processing capabilities as in the AirPod Max get us closer to that reality.
