Apple is working on AirPods Max 2 and AirPod Lite for less than $100
Apple is working on AirPods Max 2 and AirPod Lite for less than $100.
With the AirPods Lite, Apple could try to recover market share, as the sector has been flooded with a large number of cheap earphones over the years.
According to analyst Min-Chi Kuo, Apple is working on the next generation of its AirPods Max over-ear headphones and developing a “lite” version priced at $99 of its AirPods earphones. However, the new products aren’t coming anytime soon, with an expected release date for the cheapest AirPods no earlier than the second half of 2024.
With the AirPods Lite, Apple could try to recover market share, as the sector has been flooded with a large number of low-cost wireless earphones over the years. AirPods 2 cost $129 while AirPods 3 cost $169, although both are often offered at discounted prices. Neither of them offers active noise cancellation, which is currently exclusive to the more expensive AirPods Pro 2 (almost €300 in the list).
Competing brands – like Oppo – have been offering active noise cancellation for under $100 for several years now. Design and satus syble aside (after all, AirPods remain the ‘original’ model), there are very few reasons to prefer AirPods to similar and cheaper third-party products. Of course, without prejudice to the advantage of immediate connection with iPhones (which is no small thing).
In 2023, Apple will focus all its resources on its first AR/VR headset. A product which, as is known, will be extremely expensive and will be destined above all for companies. Although it is not a consumer product, Apple still intends to win the marketing challenge, making the message of being a powerhouse of the new frontier of augmented and virtual reality reach everyone loud and clear. Although Apple’s first headset will be a niche product (less than 700,000 units during its first year of launch), in the coming years the company will present a rich line-up of augmented and virtual reality products with more affordable prices and aimed to its regular consumers.
Hence the need to bet everything on the success of the launch of its first viewer, a strategy that will overshadow all the other secondary products in the Apple catalog. Precisely for this reason, according to various analysts, in 2023 we will not see big announcements regarding AirPods, Ipads and MacBooks.
The new audio products are not coming any time soon, then. Kuo explained that the next AirPods, including the cheapest model, will ship from the second half of 2024 or the first half of 2025. However, we don’t know when the AirPods Max 2 will be released: the high-end headphones have never received an update since their launch in December 2020.
