Last week, a widely circulated rumor suggested Apple was working on a sensor-filled set of headphones for recording vital health statistics. The source was a post on Secret, a social network that allows people to post information anonymously, by someone claiming to be an ex-Apple employee. Now, the alleged leakster has come forward to admit that the entire idea was a fabrication.
A tumblr blog post supposedly by the poster identified only DMx claims the story was created while he was half asleep and using the bathroom.
“I made it up. I wrote it 5 minutes after I woke up on the 1st of may. I was blurry eyed, I had a headache, I was using the toilet and worrying about my blood pressure.”
He claims that it was meant to be a joke and that he is sorry for going along with story, instead of admitting it was fake from the start. He adds did not know about Apple’s patents on a similar technology, nor the company’s recent hiring of a MIT researcher who has worked on ear-worn medical devices.
“This vagueness caused people to collectively fill in the gaps. I made this mistake of not correcting people and playing up to the comments. Without releasing it, I had begun not just joking with a few friends, but accidentally trolling a far larger audience.
I didn’t aim for it to be so popular, I spent next to zero effort on writing it or spreading it … The worst part is that the story just came out of Apple hiring an expert in making products that are exactly like I described. I’d never seen the patents that Apple filed about the Earbuds. I just made it all up on the [toilet]…”
In the end, the source of the rumor was sketchy as we had expected, but the fabricated story is not that far out of touch from reality. There are people who are exploring ear-worn devices for their health and medical use and we may see such technology hit the market in the next ten years. It may not be a free set of EarPods thrown in with an iPhone, but it could evolve in some other form. So what do you think of this rumor and how it circulated so widely?
