THE BIRTH AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE IPOD

There are several myths concerning the birth of the iPod.One of these myths is that the iPod has a father -- one man who conceived and nurtured the iconic device. Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, of course, is one candidate; but engineer Tony Fadell has also been named the father of the iPod, as has Jon Rubinstein, the former head of Apple's hardware division. While they all played key roles in the iPod's development and history, the birth of the  iPod was truly a team effort.

Here's the story:

The iPod line came from Apple's "digital hub" category,when the company began creating software for the growing market of personal digital devices. Digital cameras, camcorders and organizers had well-established mainstream markets, but the company found existing digital music players "big and clunky or small and useless" with user interfaces that were "unbelievably awful," Most were based on fairly small memory chips, either 32 or 64 MB, which stored only a few dozen songs -- not much better than a cheap portable CD player. The  Nomad Jukebox from Singapore-based Creative  was one of the most popular players  based on a 2.5-inch hard drive from Fujitsu. About the size of a portable CD player but twice as heavy. The Nomad Jukebox showed the promise of storing thousands of songs on a (smallish) device. But it had some horrible flaws: It used Universal Serial Bus to transfer songs from the computer, which was painfully slow. The interface was an engineer special (unbelievably awful) and it often sucked batteries dry in just 45 minutes.

The first company he pitched it to was RealNetworks (in 2000), where the CEO, Rob Glaser, was already in control of a large content delivery system through Real's premium radio and television channels. Real could not rationalize going through the trouble of releasing an accessory to their already profitable system, so they would be caught off guard when the iTunes Music Store was opened.

Fadell also approached Phillips, which also rebuffed him.

Out of desperation, Fadell turned to Apple, which years before had sworn off consumer electronics after their unsuccessful Pippin and Newton. The executives at Apple were very enthusiastic about implementing Fadell's plan at Apple - unbeknownst to Fadell, Apple had bought the rights to SoundJam MP months before. He was hired in early 2001 and was given a development team of around thirty people and a deadline of one year to release a successful product.

According to Jon Rubinstein who joined Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs jumped on it pretty quick and he asked him (Jon) to look into it. The veteran Apple engineer has been responsible for most of the company's hardware in the last 10 years.

Now retired, Rubinstein had previously worked at NeXT, where he had been Steve Jobs' hardware guy before moving over to Apple. While at Apple, Rubinstein oversaw a string of groundbreaking machines, from the first Bondi-blue iMac to water-cooled workstations -- and, of course, the iPod. As a testament to how important both Rubinstein and the iPod were to Apple, he was put in charge of the iPod side when Apple split into separate iPod and Macintosh divisions in 2004.

Apple's team knew it’s FireWire connector which could quickly transfer songs from the computer to player -- an entire CD in a few seconds; a huge library of MP3s in minutes could solve most of the problems plagued by the Nomad. And thanks to the rapidly growing cell phone industry, new batteries and displays were constantly coming to market.

In February 2001, during the Macworld show in Tokyo, Rubinstein made a visit to Toshiba, Apple's supplier of hard drives, where executives showed him a tiny drive the company had just developed. The drive was 1.8 inches in diameter -- considerably smaller than the 2.5-inch Fujitsu drive used in competing players -- but Toshiba didn't have any idea what it might be used for. Rubinstein went back to Steve with an idea and he asked him  to ” Go for it”.

Fadell was put in charge of a small team of engineers and designers, who put the device together quickly. The team also drew heavily on Apple's in-house expertise.The team took as many parts as possible off the shelf: the drive from Toshiba, a battery from Sony, some control chips from Texas Instruments. However, Apple did not develop the iPod software entirely in-house, instead using PortalPlayer’s reference platform based on 2 ARM cores.

The platform had rudimentary software running on a commercial microkernel embedded operating system. PortalPlayer had previously been working on an IBM-branded MP3 player with Bluetooth headphones.

One of the biggest problems was battery life. If the drive was kept spinning while playing songs, it quickly drained the batteries. The solution was to load several songs into a bank of memory chips, which draw much less power. The drive could be put to sleep until it's called on to load more songs. While other manufacturers used a similar architecture for skip protection, the first iPod had a 32-MB memory buffer, which allowed batteries to stretch 10 hours instead of two or three. Given the device's parts, the iPod's final shape was obvious. All the pieces sandwiched naturally together into a thin box about the size of a pack of cards.

The iPod's basic software was also brought in -- from Pixo, which was working on an operating system for cell phones. On top of Pixo's low-level system, Apple built the iPod's celebrated user interface. The idea for the scroll wheel was suggested by Apple's head of marketing, Phil Schiller, who in an early meeting said that  the wheel was the right user interface for the product.

As the iPod came together, it garnered more and more attention from Jobs, whose insistence on excellence and high standards are stamped onto the gadget as indelibly as Apple's logo. Jobs told the Times  "Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,". He said design is not just what it looks like and feels like but how it works." Jobs insisted the iPod work seamlessly with iTunes, and that many functions should be automated, especially transferring songs

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. While describing the player, Jobs constantly referred to Apple's digital hub strategy: The Mac is a hub, or central connection point, for a host of gadgets. This prompted Chieco to start thinking about hubs: objects that other things connect to. The ultimate hub, Chieco figured, would be a spaceship. You could leave the spaceship in a smaller vessel, a pod, but you'd have to return to the mother ship to refuel and get food. Then Chieco was shown a prototype iPod, with its stark white plastic front. After Chieco saw a prototype, he thought of the movie 2001:A Space Odyssey and the phrase "Open the pod bay door, Hal!" Then it was just a matter of adding the "i" prefix, as in "iMac."

Athol Foden, a naming expert and president of Brighter Naming of Mountain View, California, noted that Apple had already trademarked the iPod name for an internet kiosk, a project that never saw the light of day. On July 24, 2000, Apple registered the iPod name for "a public internet kiosk enclosure containing computer equipment," according to the filing.

Foden said that the name 'iPod' made much more sense for an internet kiosk, which is a pod for a human, than a music player. He said when you think about the product, it doesn’t really fit. But it doesn't matter because it’s  short and sweet.

Foden said the name is a stroke of genius: It is simple, memorable and, crucially, it doesn't describe the device, so it can still be used as the technology evolves, even if the device's function changes. He noted the "i" prefix has a double meaning: It can mean "internet," as in "iMac," or it can denote the first person: "I," as in me.

NOTE:to learn more on iPod see wikipedia.

The product was developed in less than one year and unveiled on 23 October 2001, about five weeks after 9/11. Jobs introduced the finished product at a special event at Apple's HQ. He announced it as a Mac-compatible product with a 5 GB hard drive that put "1,000 songs in your pocket."As of September 2008, more than 173 million iPods had been sold worldwide, making it the best-selling digital audio player series in history.

Tony Fadell, former employee of General Magic and Phillips, envisioned a brand new MP3 player. Unlike the bulky flash memory-based MP3 players from Rio and other companies, Fadell wanted to deliver a small hard drive-based player that was linked with a content delivery system where users could legally obtain and download music.