An ex-Apple engineer disclosed he was among those who worked on the newly-released AirPods Max and that its development took many years, having started in 2016.
Apple as put all speculations to rest when the company finally decided to release the new AirPods Max over-ear headphone on Tuesday. With a price tag of $549, Apple said its new AirPods Max will start arriving beginning next week. While everyone marveled at the capabilities and design of the new over-ear headphone, only a few people actually know that its planning and development took years. Recently, a former Apple engineer revealed that he was among those who worked on the innovative headphones and that planning, as well as development, started in 2016.
Ex-Apple engineer reveals AirPods Max were planned four years ago https://t.co/vpfD3yID9C $AAPL pic.twitter.com/asZb1Vgsdz — MacHash (@MacHashNews) December 9, 2020
Dinesh Dave, a former engineer at Apple made the disclosure recently when he posted on Twitter that "The last product NDA I signed is finally out!" upon learning that Apple released the AirPods Max over-ear headphones. Another Twitter user and former Mac Operations Lead at Apple, Ryan Jones, saw the post and asked about his tweet. In response, Dave said that he signed the NDA in 2016, or four years ago. Dave has since deleted his original tweet, though the rest of the conversation thread is still there.
It was not clear whether the information that Dave revealed in his tweet is purely accidental or if it was a product of pure elation. The former engineer at Apple made it clear in his succeeding tweets that he is not claiming credit for the innovative over-ear headphones. "Not my project to be honest. Many friends worked very hard on it. I just so happened to be assigned a while ago," Dave said of Apple's AirPods Max over-ear headphones.
Rumors about the AirPods Max over-ear headphone go back a long time, around early 2018. The first to mention the headphones was Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who hinted at the interest of Apple in developing its own-brand headphones. Since then, rumors have spread about how the headphone could look like and the features it will have.
As it turns out, the timeline of AirPods max over-ear headphones' development goes much further than that. Based on the now-deleted posts of former Apple engineer Dinesh Dave, who goes by the user name @appleidinesh, planning and development began in 2016, two full years before the initial disclosure of Ming-Chi Kuo.
Jones, the former Mac Operations Lead and Weather Line developer, managed to capture screenshots of Dave's tweets and shared them online. This means even if Dave already deleted his original post about AirPods max over-ear headphones' planning and development starting in 2016, which indicates that development took many years, a record of his Twitter posts still exists.
