Apple Intros Over-Ear AirPods Max

After staking a commanding lead in the true wireless earbud category with two versions of in-ear AirPods ($159 and $249), Apple took an old-school turn with Tuesday’s announcement of the $549 AirPods Max over-ear headphones. AirPods Max have an Apple H1 chip built into each ear cup and use “computational audio” from the chips’ 10 audio cores -- capable of 9 billion operations per second -- to provide adaptive equalization, active noise cancellation, a transparency mode and spatial audio, said the company. It didn’t respond to questions on whether it’s continuing to develop the company's Beats by Dre headphones line.