Ex-Apple engineer reveals AirPods Max were planned four years ago

Authored by appleinsider.com and submitted by Dominican_redditor

A former engineer who worked on the new AirPods Max has said that development started in 2016, just as the original AirPods were released.

Now that the AirPods Max are on sale, one of the engineers who worked on the product has revealed just how long they were in development. In a now deleted tweet, ex-Apple engineer Dinesh Dave says he first signed a non-disclosure agreement about the work back in 2016.

Dinesh Dave, who is now a product designer at Facebook, was a senior interactive designer at Apple from June 2014 to February 2018. On the launch day of the new headphones, he tweeted about them, saying, "The last product NDA I signed is finally out!"

That was originally all he said, however he was then questioned by Twitter user Ryan Jones, himself formerly a Mac Operations Lead at Apple. In response, as spotted by iMore, Dave added that he had signed this NDA around four years ago.

AirPods Max design started 4+ years ago! pic.twitter.com/W8rHTZIbVx — Ryan Jones (@rjonesy) December 9, 2020

Dinesh Dave has since deleted his original tweet, but part of the conversation remains.

"Not my project to be honest," he says. "A lot of friends worked very hard on it. I just so happened to be assigned a while ago."

-L-e-o-n- on December 9th, 2020 at 14:21 UTC »

I have no opinion on these headphones.

GLOBALSHUTTER on December 9th, 2020 at 14:07 UTC »

The price built up over four years

redavid on December 9th, 2020 at 12:51 UTC »

we've been reading rumors about them for at least that long, feels like