Hyderabad, March 17 -- Five years is a long time to wait for a refresh, and Apple has finally given the AirPods Max a proper update. The AirPods Max 2, launched on March 16, ditches the Lightning port for USB-C and gets Apple's H2 chip, the same one powering the AirPods Pro 2.

The headline improvement is noise cancellation. Apple says the H2 chip and reworked audio processing do a noticeably better job of blocking out the sound in airplane cabins and city traffic. Transparency mode has also been tweaked to sound less processed and more like you've simply taken the headphones off.

Audio quality gets a bump too, courtesy of a redesigned amplifier. The USB-C switch also unlocks wired lossless audio at 24-bit, 48 kHz, something audiophiles ...