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

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."

The original AirPods did not ship until December 2016. However, they were announced months earlier and so it's possible that Apple saw sufficient interest and demand that developing the AirPods Max was warranted.

8 Comments

lkrupp 10521 comments · 19 Years

About 3 years ago

This should be educational to those who think hardware and software development can happen with a snap of the finger. That new Mac/iPad/iPhone that just came out was in development for years. Work on ASi Macs was probably already in the pipeline a decade ago.

dewme 5737 comments · 10 Years

lkrupp said:

This should be educational to those who think hardware and software development can happen with a snap of the finger. That new Mac/iPad/iPhone that just came out was in development for years. Work on ASi Macs was probably already in the pipeline a decade ago.

Exactly, and the path from “Big-R R&D” (research heavy) to “Big-D R&D” (development heavy) is often nonlinear. Individual artifacts from research, architecture, and advanced development quite often spin off as development projects that hit the market long before the primary focus of the original effort comes to fruition. I believe the iPad R&D was actually started prior to the iPhone.

22july2013 3725 comments · 11 Years

Was it likely a threat from Apple that got Dave to remove his tweet? Or could Apple have gone to Twitter to get it removed?

MplsP 4020 comments · 8 Years

22july2013 said:

Was it likely a threat from Apple that got Dave to remove his tweet? Or could Apple have gone to Twitter to get it removed?

Or maybe it violated his employment agreement?

lkrupp said:

This should be educational to those who think hardware and software development can happen with a snap of the finger. That new Mac/iPad/iPhone that just came out was in development for years. Work on ASi Macs was probably already in the pipeline a decade ago.

Yes - R&D doesn’t occur overnight, especially if you are focused on a solid design like Apple typically is. Apple said the AirPods Max were custom designed. That alone would probably take a couple of years. People may quibble about the price but the AirPods Max headphones are a very technologically complex product with a lot of features that Apple needed to get right.

Rayz2016 6957 comments · 8 Years

dewme said:

lkrupp said:

This should be educational to those who think hardware and software development can happen with a snap of the finger. That new Mac/iPad/iPhone that just came out was in development for years. Work on ASi Macs was probably already in the pipeline a decade ago.

Exactly, and the path from “Big-R R&D” (research heavy) to “Big-D R&D” (development heavy) is often nonlinear. Individual artifacts from research, architecture, and advanced development quite often spin off as development projects that hit the market long before the primary focus of the original effort comes to fruition. I believe the iPad R&D was actually started prior to the iPhone.

Yup, the iPad was conceived before the iPhone.