Eugene Whang, a former Apple hardware designer who spent 22 years at the company before following Jony Ive to LoveFrom, has shared new details about the development of AirPods Max in an interview with Highsnobiety. Here are the details.
In the interview (via AppleInsider), Whang discusses the many factors Apple’s design team had to account for when developing AirPods Max, from the wide range of head and ear shapes to the fact that the team effectively treated the headphones as three separate products:
From Highsnobiety:
He and the team worked on it for five years on what was essentially three products: the headband, the case, and the cushion. The latter was particularly challenging because people’s heads and ears come in so many shapes and sizes. The team went through “hundreds and hundreds of variations,” he says.
Whang also noted that Apple decided not to add its logo anywhere on AirPods Max, since the company “didn’t want to brand your head.”
Interestingly, Whang says he got his first opportunity at Apple after he looked up someone on Apple’s design team who wouldn’t be as busy as Jony Ive was to mentor him:
Assuming Ive would be too busy, he found the name of a different designer from an Apple team directory — someone who looked friendly. “I guessed an email. Then I called. I just rang Apple up, like 1-800-Apple,” he says. “It was like, why not reach out? They’re just people.”
In addition to AirPods Max, Whang worked on several other products during his two-decade tenure at Apple, including the iPod nano, iPhone, and the regular AirPods.
In the interview, Whang also echoes a familiar point about Jony Ive’s role at Apple: that he helped shield the design team, and its ideas, from the pressures of the company’s business side.
During Whang’s time there, Apple transformed from renegade to dominant force. A leader not only in technology, but for the global economy. “Jony shielded us from a lot of it,” Whang says of Ive, his boss and mentor. “He had to take a lot of hits for being in that position.”
Whang left Apple shortly after Ive launched LoveFrom with fellow designer Marc Newson, but stepped away a few years later following the death of his mother and a broader reassessment of how he wanted to spend his time.
Highsnobiety’s interview is quite interesting and includes a few photos of other Apple products he helped design, as well as sketches of a mystery piece of hardware. You can read it in full here.
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