A Look back at the iPod on its 20th Anniversary
Yesterday was the official 20th anniversary of the iPod, the product that began Apple's road back from the verge of bankruptcy back in 1997. It was Apple's first truly innovative device beyond Macs that caught the world by surprise, killing off Sony's Walkman and MP3 players in short order. It was a phenomena that could hold a 1,000 songs in your pocket.
On Thursday, Bloomberg interview Tony Fadel, one of the major contributors bringing the iPod to market. While Fadell believes that Apple is working on a new major product release, he also played up the fact that innovation will also be displayed in bringing to market new accessories, services and software.
Fadell also used the interview to side step and take a whack at Facebook's elusive 'Metaverse." Fadell stated that he had "heard about the metaverse in 1988 when we were doing VR glasses back in the day. I’m still skeptical it’s going to be a big thing. I think it could be big in corporate and industrial. But to get that emotional aspect for consumers to want to be in it all the time? That’s tough."
He also warned about unintended consequences of technology -- including in a field he helped pioneer -- referring to smartphones as the "refrigerator for all this dystopia that we see with social media." Fadell said it is incumbent on tech executives to regulate themselves, and not to expect the government to do it. He referred to a decision by former Apple CEO Steve Jobs not to sell porn on the iTunes store, despite arguments that the category would be extremely popular and profitable.
"Steve got up and said, ‘Is this the kind of society we want to live in? Is this what we want to have our kids use as products?'" Fadell said. "It goes down to executive teams and boards of these teams to make sure they are self-regulating." That seemed like another whack at Zuckerberg and his teams not regulating their platform responsibly. For more on this, read the full Bloomberg report.
Looking Back at the iPod's Genesis
As ordered by CEO Steve Jobs, Apple's hardware engineering chief Jon Rubinstein contacted Tony Fadell, a former employee of General Magic and Philips who had a business idea to invent a better MP3 player and build a music sales store to complement it. Fadell, who had previously developed the Philips Velo and Nino PDA, had started a company called Fuse Systems to build the MP3 player and had been turned down by RealNetworks, Sony and Philips. Rubinstein had already discovered the Toshiba hard disk drive while meeting with an Apple supplier in Japan, and purchased the rights to it for Apple, and had also already worked out how the screen, battery, and other key elements would work.
Fadell found support for his project with Apple Computer and was hired by Apple in 2001 as an independent contractor to work on the iPod project, then code-named project P-68. Due to the engineers and resources at Apple being constrained with the iMac line, Fadell hired engineers from his startup company, Fuse, and veteran engineers from General Magic and Philips to build the core iPod development team.
Time constraints forced Fadell to develop various components of the iPod outside Apple. Fadell partnered with a company called PortalPlayer to design the software for the new Apple music player which became the iPod OS. Within eight months, Tony Fadell's team and PortalPlayer had completed a prototype.
The power supply was then designed by Michael Dhuey and the display design made by design engineer Sir Jonathan Ive in-house Apple. The aesthetic was inspired by the 1958 Braun T3 transistor radio designed by Dieter Rams, while the wheel-based user interface was prompted by Bang & Olufsen's BeoCom 6000 telephone.
Apple contracted another company, Pixo, to help design and implement the user interface (as well as Unicode, memory management, and event processing) under the direct supervision of Steve Jobs.
The name iPod was proposed by Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter, who (with others) was called by Apple to figure out how to introduce the new player to the public. After Chieco saw a prototype, he thought of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and the phrase "Open the pod bay doors, Hal," which refers to the white EVA Pods of the Discovery One spaceship. Chieco saw an analogy to the relationship between the spaceship and the smaller independent pods in the relationship between a personal computer and the music player.
The product (which Fortune called "Apple's 21st-Century Walkman") was developed in less than one year and unveiled on October 23, 2001. Jobs announced it as a Mac-compatible product with a 5 GB hard drive that put "1,000 songs in your pocket."
Apple researched the trademark and found that it was already in use. Joseph N. Grasso of New Jersey had originally listed an "iPod" trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in July 2000 for Internet kiosks. The first iPod kiosks had been demonstrated to the public in New Jersey in March 1998, and commercial use began in January 2000 but had apparently been discontinued by 2001. The trademark was registered by the USPTO in November 2003, and Grasso assigned it to Apple Computer. Below is a copy of the U.S. Patent and Trademark iPod docket. We attempted to go deeper into the documents but were denied.
(Click on image to Enlarge)
Looking back at the iPod with Tony Fadell
On Saturday, C/Net published Roger Cheng's conducted an in-depth interview with Tony Fadell that centered more on the iPod in contrast to the Bloomberg interview.
Below is a 3 minute snippet of a 15:49 minute Zoom interview. You could check out the full Zoom interview and in-depth report here.
The iPhone's Killer App
The iPod became the Killer App for the iPhone when launched in 2007 as presented in the series of images from that historic keynote. Jobs repeated the phrase: An iPod … a Phone … an Internet Communicator – do you get it?!
Not only did the iPhone introduce a multi-touch interface and revolutionary user interface, it had their iPod software that made it a killer app that no mobile phone on the planet had at the time had. It was truly a "Smartphone" that took the world by storm by allowing tens of millions of iPod users to bring their music to a smartphone. It was magic and spoke to that generation like no other device at that time.
"An iPod … a Phone … an Internet Communicator – Do you get it?!"
Steve Jobs
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