In a surprise launch on Monday, Apple unveiled the AirPods Max 2, the long-awaited successor to its premium headphones that launched in 2020.

The Max 2 cost $549, and feature active noise cancellation, Apple’s audio-specific H2 chip, support for live translation, better sound quality, and more. The headphones will be available for preorder starting March 25, in midnight, starlight, orange, purple, and blue colors, and will be available early next month.

Apple says the new headphones’ active noise cancellation (ANC) is up to 1.5x more effective than their predecessor. And the Adaptive Audio feature lets the headphones automatically adjust the levels of ANC and Transparency based on the user’s surroundings to optimize the listening experience.

The company says Transparency mode is now more natural, thanks to a new digital signal-processing algorithm optimized for the H2 chip and the AirPods Max microphone array, so users can stay aware of their surroundings and the people around them.

The headphones come with Live Translation, which helps users communicate across languages in person. They also feature voice isolation, which uses “advanced computational audio” to prioritize your voice during calls and block out ambient noise.

Apple says the AirPods Max 2 has a new, high-dynamic-range amplifier for cleaner audio, and Spatial Audio is said to be better, with improved localization of instruments, better bass response, and natural mids and highs.

The headphones also support Camera Remote, a feature that lets you trigger the iPhone or iPad’s camera shutter from a distance. On the Max 2, you press the Digital Crown to take a photo, or start and stop video recording in the Camera app, or compatible third-party camera apps on iPhone or iPad.

Additionally, Apple says the headphones’ Loud Sound Reduction feature helps protect users from loud environmental noise while preserving the sound signature of what they’re listening to.

Apple says the headphones’ mic allows interviewers, podcasters, singers, and other creators to capture content with higher-quality audio and more natural vocal texture.

The AirPods Max 2 support 24-bit, 48 kHz lossless audio when used with the included USB-C cable.

The Airpods Max 2 will be available in more than 30 countries and regions.

Shopify is preparing for the transformation of a lifetime, according to its president, Harley Finkelstein. Speaking at this year’s Upfront Summit in Los Angeles, the longtime e-commerce veteran spoke about how the company is going all in on agentic shopping. 

Shopify is the second-largest e-commerce provider in the U.S. behind Amazon. But Finkelstein says that only about 18% of retail purchases in the U.S. are made online. Agentic can change that, acting as a new front door for e-commerce sellers.

“We’re going to begin to use these agentic applications as these kinds of personal shoppers,” he said, adding that the initial rollout will be slow. Agentic personal shoppers are predicted to be the future of shopping in some ways — able to discover, buy, and compare products for consumers more effectively. 

Finkelstein said that agents will bring context to shopping, which is not something traditional search engines do well at the moment. He offered the example of searching for athletic shoes. One of his favorite brands, he said, is On.

“Agentic is fundamentally merit-based as opposed to, if you go to a search engine, you type sneakers, you’re going to see Footlocker,” he said. But once his agentic shopper knows his preference for On running shoes, the next time he searches for such shoes, the agent will do a better job of representing options from On, rather than options sold at popular, mass retailers like Footlocker. 

This is, we’d point out, a bit simplistic. Current search engines already tailor shopping or search displays toward a person’s search and browsing history.

But it is also true that agentic shopping should one day be able to take the person’s preferences into consideration at a much higher level.

“We’re still going to be influenced by the people we see, the people we watch on social media, on television, but I think the chat application is actually a more authentic personal shopper because it’s generally not on commission,” he said, “meaning it’s only going to show you the things it thinks you are most likely to purchase.”

He added there are a lot of merchants on Shopify that struggle with having their products discovered, “and actually, this is where we think agentic will play a huge role in surfacing new brands to those customers.” 

He said Shopify is currently building an AI assistant for merchants called Sidekick. It is also building an agent to handle support issues and a protocol so agents can better understand merchant data, such as product details. Overall, he thinks agentic shopping will be another spoke on the retail operating machine. 

“We’re probably more excited about this particular new era of commerce than we have ever been because we think it’s just going to create so much opportunity,” he said, “not just for the large merchants, but for the long tail of merchants.” 

There is a new key term to know as part of this artificial intelligence revolution, at least according to Antonio Gracias, the founder of Valor Equity Partners. 

While chatting at this year’s Upfront Summit in Los Angeles, he spoke about the term he coined — proentropic — a descriptor for startups designed to thrive in chaos and disruption. Such upheavals include the increasing volatility of climate and geopolitics and, of course, technology. 

The term has its roots in physics, where entropy is a measure of the amount of disorder or uncertainty in a system. The second law of thermodynamics is that the disorder in a system will increase over time, and it cannot be stopped; it’s natural for a system, akin to real life, to always move toward a state of more disorder. 

Gracias admitted that the term might be hard to understand and that he started thinking about it back in 2013, when he thought that a combination of deglobalization and technological change would globally “shift all the power structures.” 

He said the world has been leaning toward chaos since at least the end of the last century as “human populations [have] gotten bigger and technologies have changed.” 

“We are looking at businesses that are really good at predicting that future state and figuring out where to go,” he said, citing his portfolio company SpaceX as an example. 

“It’s not just that they’re in a market today [that] they think works, but [they’ve] baked into their strategy and their people a way of thinking about the world that’s probabilistic” — meaning that anything can change at any moment in time. 

It “really takes into account what might happen at the edge cases and actually benefits from them,” he added. 

Elsewhere in the conversation, he spoke about the firm’s strategy of conviction and again referenced the world’s macro situation. “We’re going into a period now in the economy where if you really want to build a better world, you’re going to have to have moral courage.” 

He spoke about the intersection of climate, energy, and hardware, using Tesla as an example. “You can build great stuff with not a lot of compute if you know how to integrate the software and the hardware, he said. Gracias also spoke about what he thinks the future of this moment in time will be. 

“The prevailing narrative is that artificial intelligence is going to be terrible. Job losses, social unrest,” he listed off. “And I think this is not true. I’m going to work really hard in the next five to 10 years to make it not true.” Instead, he thinks the opportunities are greater than ever. 

For example, he thinks that as low-code/no-code tools become more effective, more people will be able to start companies and thus unleash unseen levels of productivity. “Who knows what they will build,” he continued. 

“We will decide whether we have a utopian future or a dystopian future.”