 Apple AirPods Max, stylish, trendy, fashionable, the ultimate status symbol, except they're fake. These knockoff, a-pull, not to be confused with apple, AirPods Max cost less than $200, all while promising to deliver a one-to-one authentic experience, whatever that means. Let's see if they live up to the manufacturer's lofty claims. Like I live up to, telling you about our sponsor, Antlion Audio. The ModMic wireless microphone delivers best-in-class audio quality, 12 plus hours of battery life, and can magnetically mount to almost any headphones. Even these. Get 15% off the ModMic wireless and other ModMic products at the link down below. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the market for knockoff Apple products is absolutely huge. If you roll over to your favorite unscrupulous e-commerce site, be it AliExpress, DHgate, or Wish, you will find an absolute mountain of fake Apple products. Apple Watch for $18? Sounds good to me. Well, sort of. These kinds of super budget rip-offs are usually nothing like the original product, aside from bearing a passing resemblance to it. The performance and build quality will be terrible, the battery life is typically non-existent, and the feature set won't even be in the same universe, let alone ballpark. But in certain categories, if you step up your budget a bit, there's this weird middle ground of premium knockoff devices that can actually come pretty close to the real thing. And that is what I suspect we have here today. These specific headphones were sent over by a company that calls themselves ProMax, very clever name by the way, and they included a little note. Hi Linus. We here at ProMax are excited for you to review our newest headphones. When we designed these headphones, we wanted to make something similar to the AirPods Max and have an emphasis on price to quality ratio. Active noise cancellation, different colors, sound quality. We guarantee this will be the best headphones available under the $200 mark, and the closest it will ever get to the original AirPods Max. Wow, same material, same sound, same style, just much more affordable. Enjoy ProMax team. Available at www.atpromax.com. Sad story by the way, that website appears to be gone. Honestly speaking, this note raises more questions than it answers. I mean, when we designed these headphones, what does that even mean? Does it count as design if you just scan someone else's product and carbon copied it, or maybe even somehow gained access to their tooling? I don't wanna be a snob, but best headphones available under $200 and closest it will get to the original AirPods Max, you gotta pick one, brah, because they're headphones under $200 that sound a lot better than even the real AirPods Max. They're okay. Same material, same sound, same style, just much more affordable. I will be the judge of that because I have both a pair of real AirPods Max and, oh right, the ProMax. My God, see, I got confused. I was like, wait a minute, I thought it's AirPods Max, not AirPods Pro Max. Yes, it is AirPods Max. I have both a pair of real AirPods Max and the ProMax Pro Maxes, and I am going to be comparing them, starting with trying to figure out which one of these is the real one and which one is fake, because, not gonna lie, I cannot tell based on the packaging. Wait, yes I can. This has to be the fake. Apple's paper quality is higher. No, I'm serious, that's a thing. Somehow it looks like they actually got their hands on Apple's original assets rather than it just being a high quality scan. No, no, no, no, hold on. I think there's less contrast in the print. It's really interesting to me that they didn't have the guts to put AirPods on the name of the product, because I guess they were worried that would attract Apple's lawyers, but then, so then again, they don't put Apple here, but they put their address as One Apple Parkway, Cupertino, California. I don't understand these lines you're drawing. Yeah. I think this is actually for customs reasons. So if you're importing knockoff products, it's not as illegal if they're not called the same thing. Right, but here's the problem. It says right here, AirPods, oh my God, this is hilarious. AirPods Max Silver with White Headband, designed by Apple in California. Apple, you don't have a California design studio. Oh my God, compatible with iOS and iPadOS devices, Apple Watch or Mac with the latest software. So I better not try and pair it with an Apple Watch. I better make sure I have an Apple Watch. You gotta get immersed in the ecosystem. All right, I haven't actually looked at the AirPods Max since we did our review, because why would I? So I'm gonna start with the fake ones, and I'm gonna see if without comparing to the originals, I would be able to tell the difference. To be clear, Apple's box quality is better, but this is good. So here I've got my smart case. Mesh seems pretty meshy. I'd wear pants made out of that. Honestly, the materials feel great. Like this is super soft, and the whole thing's pretty pliable. Like it feels, wait a second. Whoa, there was a thing, a thing popped up. Did it manage to actually pick up just like AirPods Max when you open them up? Did you put the wrong, are these the real ones? Just double check. I like triple check before, but I just wanna make sure. Oh my God, these are the real ones. All right, let's try this again. Oh God. Well, for starters, the smart case is not built to the same standard of quality. Still got magnets, okay. Like functionally, it's exactly the same. Somehow they managed to reverse engineer Apple's pairing process. So it works like magic, just like normal AirPods would. Whoa, look at that. Everything in here actually looks legit. Connect, press and hold the noise control button. Okay, wait. Wait a second. These are plastic. Did Pro Max lie to me? Same material. No, I need the real AirPods. Hold on a second, where'd they go? Fetch me a scale. Let's start with the Pro Max Pro Maxes. 400 grams, okay, official AirPods Max. Wait, what? What the hell? Okay, hold on a second. Are they plastic? Okay, now I'm doubting. These are so much colder to the touch. No, this has to be, how do they weigh more than the real ones? Okay, just don't answer that. I wanna figure it out on my own. Okay, 385. Oh, I'm opening these. I wanna find out if there's weights inside. Okay, this. This is how we'll tell which ones are real. Ha ha ha ha. This feels metal though. Okay, it has the resize mechanism. They feel the same, but this one sounds cheaper. Here, hold on. No, no, I'm gonna quantify this. Okay, David, listen, listen, listen, hold on. Here's real AirPods Max. You got that? Okay, fake. Oh. For knockoffs though, not bad. For knockoffs, not bad at all. Also, I take back what I said about the mesh. Both of them, this mesh is a bad design. That's the thing about copying an Apple product is you're copying everything for better or for worse. Wow. Now, that's impressive. I was just standing here talking while the noise cancellation kicked in. It really works. Even the sound of my own voice, the sound of our HVAC here, it's like, no, okay, you make that face, but I have yet to encounter a knockoff product that manages noise cancellation that works like this. Okay, now hold on a second. That did not sound very good. You're quieter, but it also sounds like you're coming from over there. It's really creepy. There's jakes all around me. In terms of just ambient noise though, kicks it to the curb. It's not bad. Okay, I'm in transparency mode now. I'm expecting this to be not as good. Hi, how's it going? It's muffled, but it's more transparent. Yeah, they're definitely not using the same grade of microphones on these. If the goal was for these to pass as real, then as long as your friends don't ever call you on it and grab them, I think you'd get away with it. They did a really good job with the finish on the plastic. Let's take a moment to appreciate that for what it is. It is really, really hard to nail down an anodized or a blasted aluminum finish on plastic. And these look really close, really close. Oh, interesting. They just totally got the clamping pressure wrong. Cause- The real AirPods Max, they have a mechanism that allows them to, if you take them off your head, you can see there's like a lot of- Wait. Yeah, they have it. They have it. It's just crappier. And here on the original AirPods Max, it's just, it's a smoother mechanism and it doesn't require as much force. So it means that when they sit on your ears, wow, this transparency mode is so much better. When they sit on your ears, they sit at the right angle. Whereas these, the clamping pressure is too much and they don't really sit at the right angle. So it puts a bunch of pressure at the top. Yeah, this transparency mode is absolute horse poo compared to the Apple one. The fact that they have it at all, you're right. But here, let's just turn it off entirely. Okay, talk to me. Okay, okay, keep talking. Things and stuff and stuff and things, how's it going? Telling you about my day. I had a fantastic morning. I drank some coffee. Oh, it is. It is markedly better than just having it off. I didn't drink any coffee. But this is- I had a biscotti with my coffee. Very natural sounding for conversation. Now this is where things might get interesting because if they did manage to get their hands on the exact driver, they probably still sound relatively poo poo because they're not gonna be tuned properly for this plastic housing. The drivers do look identical, even down to the really fine mesh in front of them. It's very loud. You know, if I was into a kind of bass heavy, kind of muddy mainstream sound signature, they're not bad. I am very surprised. Okay, let's see if they turn off when I put them here. It works. So what I noticed, the sensors detect that you're taking them off. You can take them off and put them on the desk. Yeah. But like it's done the beep to tell you that they've taken them off. Yeah. When you put them back on, you hear the beep that tells them that they're on again. Yeah. But sometimes it doesn't pause the music depending on the app. They're still going. And they're off. Okay. Bit of a delay. Wait, they're back. Oh. It's my chin. See? Okay. Hold on, hold on, hold on. I figured it out. Okay. You put them face down on the table and they play. Yeah, so the sensors are just not tuned correctly. LTT's AirPods Max. More balanced. Definitely better sounding. And transparency mode is a universe better. So much better. I still can't hear you just because these are pretty loud right now. Way more balanced sound. That's something that Apple has managed to maintain in spite of their beats acquisition. Yeah, they're better. They're also $550. A song like this really reveals that even though these are much more detailed than the fake ones, they are really not great headphones. It's just, there's just too much. It just can't handle it. There's not enough resolution here. Anyway, that's not the point. The point is we're gonna see what we can do to EQ the fake ones to at least hit this level. I see you have what appears to be a suggested EQ curve here. So I'm gonna try yours first. I see you've really neutered the bass. Just... Goodbye bass. With enough tinkering, you could reach the point of satisfying sounding. I'll say that. I don't know if you could get quite to the level of the regular AirPods Max. Now, the thing I wanna know next is what have they done Bluetooth wise to make these identify as a genuine Apple product? Now you did some sniffing around in what's going on there, right? So I did some sleuthing on an Android phone because that's all you can really do Apple phones don't really give you that much data. Interestingly enough, they use the same, exact same codec, exact same bit rate, exact same sample rate as the real one. Yeah. It's all the same. I wasn't able to determine how they sleuthed it because they don't even show Apple as the manufacturer. Well, there are non-Apple headphones that do operate like Apple headphones, like Beats for example. Well, they'll work in exactly the same way. You flip open your case and it prompts you to pair. The last magical thing they managed to clone is synchronization between your Apple devices. So if you have an iPhone and a MacBook, for example, if you pair these to one of your devices, it will pair to both of them. But what doesn't work is switching. So you're sitting there with your iPhone on the desk and you're using your MacBook and you wanna just like use iCloud to switch between them, that will not work. You'll have to just disconnect them from one and connect them to the other. Okay. Well, that was a very straightforward disassembly process. These bear no internal resemblance to real ones. I don't know what else to tell you about that other than that. So I used them for like eight hours, like a whole day. And they had like 25% battery left at the end of the day. Really? So they last a whole day. So they last a whole day. That's not bad. It sounds like they have about half of the real AirPods Max, which makes sense. The real AirPods Max are around 20 to 23 hours. Here we go. So Sun Woda, two cells in parallel, total capacity of 664 milliamp hours. And this is 470 milliamp hours in a single cell. Okay then. Okay, so that kind of tracks out. Yeah, that tracks. Now, what would be surprising, but who knows, is if we opened up the other side and found that there's another cell in there. I really doubt it though. Yeah, yeah, it's just got the one cell in there. No weights or anything. There's no weights. Wait. Yes, there are. I thought this was a little shelf in the mold for the cell that's missing to sit on, but it's not, it's a weight. Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's probably like actually lead. Lead's expensive, it's probably steel. Oh yeah. I don't know, Alex, it looks really, really malleable. I'm trying to find it. We have the super strong magnet bit from the LTT store screwdriver. Huh, maybe it is lead. I'm not gonna put these back together, but we did test this already. Latency is worse on the knockoffs compared to regular AirPods Max, though it should be noted that neither of them are great. And the pausing when you take them off your ears, as well as battery life monitoring work on Android. So even though the, what is it? Max Pro Max, even though Pro Max has disappeared, it looks like you can still get your hands on these. So the question then is, should you? Well, if you don't wanna support the bootleg product industry, then the answer is no. No, you shouldn't. But if you don't care about that and you just wanna know if they're good value, if your goal is to kind of pose as an Apple AirPods Max owner, then yes, I'd say they're a great value. They sound good enough. It's not like they're completely unlistenable. But are these a great value at $200? The answer is no. But you were shopping for AirPods Max, so you probably didn't care about that anyway. But you might care about our sponsor. 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