AirPods Max designer reveals project details in new interview

Eugene Whang, a former Apple hardware designer who spent 22 years at the company before following Jony Ive at LoveFrom, shared new details about the development of AirPods Max in an interview with Highsnobiety. Here are the details.

AirPods Max designer discusses his 22-year stint at Apple

In the interview (via woozad), Whang discusses the many factors Apple’s design team had to consider when developing the AirPods Max, from the wide range of head and ear shapes to the fact that the team effectively treated the earbuds as three separate products:

From Highsnobiety:

He and his team worked on it for five years on essentially three products: the headband, the case and the cushion. The latter was particularly difficult because people’s heads and ears come in many shapes and sizes. The team experimented with “hundreds and hundreds of variations,” he says.

Whang also noted that Apple decided not to add its logo to the AirPods Max because the company “didn’t want to brand your face.”

Interestingly, Whang says he got his first opportunity at Apple after looking for 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 another designer in the Apple team directory – someone who seemed friendly. “I guessed an email. Then I called. I just called Apple, 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 classic AirPods.

In the interview, Whang also echoes a familiar point about Jony Ive’s role at Apple: he helped protect the design team and its ideas from pressures from the business side of the company.

During Whang’s time there, Apple went from renegade to dominant force. A leader not only in technology, but also in the global economy. “Jony protected us from a lot of things,” Whang says of Ive, his boss and mentor. “He had to take a lot of hits to get into that position.”

Whang left Apple shortly after launching LoveFrom with fellow designer Marc Newson, but stepped down 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 some photos of other Apple products he helped design, as well as sketches of some mysterious hardware. You can read it in full here.

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