iPod - The Perfect Thing

iPod - The Perfect Thing

Five years ago, Apple engineers used foam core and old fishing weights to craft a model of a new MP3 player. The age of the iPod was about to begin.
By Steven Levy

In mid-October 2001, I received an invitation to one of Steve Jobs' carefully choreographed, exquisitely casual shows. It was to be held at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California, on October 23. The most interesting thing about the invitation was the teasing addendum: "Hint: It's not a Mac." Usually, I would have hopped on a plane to see the latest wrinkle in the consistently fascinating saga of Jobs. His return to Apple was a great business story in itself, but what was novel about his whole career was its unapologetic and unprecedented grafting of 1960s values – everything from rock and roll to cracker-barrel Buddhism – into the corporate world. Jobs was a great salesman, a guy who out-suited the suits when it came to mastering the pulleys and levers of global high tech product development and manufacturing, a chief executive of two companies traded on the Nasdaq (Apple and Pixar Entertainment). But I'd also seen him stroll into his boardroom wearing scissor-cut shorts almost up to his balls and a pair of flip-flops. All of this – the austere authority of a Zen poet, the playfulness of Mick Jagger, and the showmanship of David Copperfield – would be on display at this event. And if history was any guide, the product he unveiled would be worth writing about.

But I didn't make it to the show. I wasn't traveling much those days. It was, after all, little more than a month after 9/11, and I, like just about everyone else in New York City, was depressed.

I did, however, follow news of the event carefully. Steve Jobs is maniacal about maintaining total stealth in his operation, but a cat of this magnitude could not be fully bagged, and word was leaking that the "not a Mac" was some kind of digital music player. The prospect did not exactly thrill people. Digital music players – also known as MP3 players, in reference to the encoding algorithm that compresses music into data files – had been around for a few years already, but novelty was their main, if not their only, virtue. They generally held too little music, had impenetrable interfaces, and looked like the cheap plastic toys given to losers at carnival games.

I don't recall being so negative myself: I made plans to write about this new toy, discussing with Apple when we might be able to photograph it. It was sometime in the afternoon of that launch day that the Apple couriers reached my office. They had been racing up and down the Atlantic seaboard spreading the new MP3 players to tech writers. So they didn't have time to do much of anything but leave the box. The packaging was a distinctive cube, with a picture of Jimi Hendrix that evoked the excitement of his volcanic performance at Monterey Pop. Inside was the iPod. It was beautiful.

Before I left the office to play with my new toy, I took my prearranged call from Jobs. He sounded out of breath. It was a quarter after one Cupertino time, and he had been chatting up his new product for hours. As interview subjects go, Jobs is a self-starter. He always has a message to deliver, and he does so with unstinting enthusiasm.

I asked him how many iPods he thought Apple would sell. "I don't do predictions." But he did do proclamations. "iPod," he said, "will be a landmark product."

That night, Microsoft hosted a small dinner in New York for a group of journalists, a prelude to its launch of Windows XP the next day. I have lots of experience talking to Bill Gates and do not break into tears when he yells, "That's the stupidest thing I ever heard!" so the Microsoft PR team seated me next to the chairman.

I brought along my new iPod. At the end of the meal, just as the other guests at the table were pushing away their chairs, I pulled out the iPod and put it in front of Gates.

"Have you seen this yet?" I asked.

Gates went into a zone that recalls those science fiction films where a space alien, confronted with a novel object, creates some sort of force tunnel between him and the object, allowing him to suck directly into his brain all possible information about it. Gates' fingers, racing at Nascar speed, played over the scroll wheel and pushed every button combination, while his eyes stared fixedly at the screen. I could almost hear the giant sucking sound. Finally, after he had absorbed every nuance of the device, he handed it back to me.

"It looks like a great product," he said.

Then he paused a second. Something didn't compute.

"It's only for Macintosh?" he asked.

Yes, it was. (Then.)

Anthony Michael Fadell was on a ski slope in Vail, Colorado, on January 23, 2001, when his cell phone rang. The 32-year-old hardware engineer was taking a rare few days off. He had recently started a small digital-music company and was more than happy to continue with it. The fiercely independent Detroit native liked the control of heading his own firm.

But this call was from Apple. All his life, Fadell had idolized the company. When he was 12, he'd combined his summer earnings as a caddy with a contribution from his grandfather to buy an Apple IIe. An ace programmer, he started three companies before he graduated from the University of Michigan. His first job out of college, in 1992, was at a startup called General Magic, working beside two of the stars of the legendary team that had created the Macintosh, Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson. It was like joining a basketball team and finding yourself teammates with Larry Bird and Dr. J.

Unfortunately, the General Magic product, a handheld communicator, was a flop. After that, Fadell went on to a weird few years at Philips Electronics. Concerned about its overly staid reputation, the Dutch conglomerate had offered Fadell, still in his twenties, the chance to head its new mobile computing group. He was by far the youngest manager at that level in the entire titanic company. Even if Fadell had had a steady temperament and been mature beyond his years, this would have been controversial. But he embraced the role of execupunk. He'd sometimes show up at work with bleached hair, and at meetings he would blast anyone within earshot. When a Fast Company reporter asked him where he'd be if he'd grown up before computers were invented, he responded, "In jail." Nonetheless, Fadell headed the development of Philips' Windows-based PDA, which sold half a million units. That gave him the idea to create a home digital entertainment device with a hard drive-based jukebox to store thousands of songs. He talked with RealNetworks about developing some of the software – and then accepted a job at Real, figuring he'd have a better chance of shipping a challenging product at a company that still retained a startup mentality. But in part because of a disagreement over whether he'd move to Seattle, he quit after only six weeks.

Now Fadell was developing the idea with his own company, Fuse Networks. But here was Jon Rubinstein, Apple's very top hardware guy, telling him to come in and talk about a project. Fadell took the meeting. Of course, Ruby, as he's known to Apple insiders, couldn't tell him anything about the project, because of the company's near-paranoia about keeping secrets. All Fadell knew was that Apple was offering him an eight-week contract to do something that it thought he was qualified to do. What could he say but yes?

Only after agreeing did he learn that the job was to put together an MP3 music player that would work with Apple's existing iTunes application and would not suck. Essentially, he'd have to build a small computer – because, once you get down to it, that's what an MP3 player is, something with a nice visual interface that runs the database program that stores the digital song files, then performs the high-speed mathematical processes that make those files into the same Jimi Hendrix and Yo-Yo Ma tunes that you'd hear on a CD player. No one mentioned that this product might transform Apple and set the technology world, the business world, and especially the music industry on their heads. Because no one suspected it would.

Apple wanted Fadell because of his expertise in the burgeoning world of handheld components. The company had been focusing on the possible elements in a new MP3 player, particularly the brand-new 1.8-inch hard drive made by Toshiba. Despite its diminutive size, it held 5 gigabytes of data – enough for 1,000 songs.

At the time, the cost and capability of such a component were sort of a crazy joke, one of a series of absurdities unleashed by Moore's law. As a yardstick of how ridiculously compact and capacious this hard drive was, consider the situation when Apple unveiled the original Macintosh in 1984. The computer badly needed a hard drive, but they were so expensive that including it in the package would have almost doubled the $2,500 price. When one finally appeared as a third-party peripheral almost a year later, it was half the size of a shoebox and cost around $2,000. It held 10 megabytes, which seemed like an enormous amount of storage at the time. Ha! The entire capacity of that 1985 disk drive is insufficient to store the MP3 file of Neil Young's "Down by the River."

Now Toshiba had a 5-gig drive so small you could swallow it, with enough capacity to pack in three days' worth of music – a thousand songs. And its cost was measured in tens of dollars, not thousands.

Fadell was assigned a partner in his efforts, a sort of consigliere who would connect him to the sometimes-confusing Cupertino culture. Chosen for the task was Stan Ng, a hardware marketing manager who had been with Apple for six years. Ng and Fadell quickly got to the nub of what was required. "'In your pocket' became the mantra for the product, because that was definitely the size and form factor that hit the sweet spot," Ng says. "There were products out there that were small but held maybe 20 or 30 songs and didn't have great battery life, and other products that had a hard drive but weighed over a pound and didn't fit in your pocket. We wanted to create something that merged the best of both worlds."

Apple demanded total stealth, so on their quest Fadell and Ng would talk to people but not really tell them what they were working on. Not even people inside the company. Eventually, Fadell began to make models of what an Apple MP3 player might look like, cutting pieces out of foam-core boards and gluing them together. He finally came up with one that he felt was ideal: a box slightly bigger than a cigarette case with a sharp screen toward the top end and navigational buttons below. But the model felt too light. He went to his garage and recovered the old tackle box he'd used many years before when he'd gone fishing with his grandfather. Still inside were some fishing weights. After flattening them with a sledgehammer, he stuck them into the model to provide a heft that approximated what the final device might feel like. He showed it to Rubinstein, who was delighted.

Fadell's contract ended in early April, and a meeting was scheduled for him to bring his conclusions to the Apple executive team. He had done his homework, not just on the project but on the politics of presenting to Steve Jobs. He came to the meeting with three different versions. Two of them were sacrificial lambs that he felt would rightfully be rejected, setting the stage for the third one, which he was sure was the perfect solution. Before the meeting, Fadell and Rubinstein hid the mock-up of this favorite under the large wooden bowl that Jobs kept on the long table in the fourth-floor conference room.

The key people were all at the meeting: Rubinstein; iTunes czar Jeff Robbin; Apple's worldwide marketing vice president, Phil Schiller; and, of course, Jobs, who had been in contact with Ruby on the project but had yet to meet Fadell. The session started out with Ng showing the usual sort of slides – stuff about the market potential, the competition, how horrible the current choices were, and the question of whether Apple could innovate. Jobs, as always, kept things moving with his interruptions. Then Fadell took over. He laid potential parts on the table – Toshiba's 1.8-inch hard drive, a small piece of glass for the screen, various battery alternatives, a sample motherboard – and began instructing the group on the finer points of handheld economics, the current pricing curves of memory and hard drive storage, what the latest battery technology was, and the kinds of displays one could use.

Executing the Goldilocks gambit, Fadell showed his first model; it had a big slot that could accept either a hard drive or a flash memory card to hold music. This was a clumsy solution and not well received. Too complicated, Jobs sniffed. Then came the second proposal, a device that would store tunes with dynamic RAM; it would be cheap and hold a bunch of songs, but if the battery died, the songs would vanish and you'd have to reload. That will never sell, grumbled Jobs. Finally, Fadell went back to the table and began grabbing the pieces he'd used to demonstrate what parts were available. As if constructing a Lego device, he snapped them together, creating something that might today be considered iPod-esque, and handed it to Jobs. The silence said, This is more like it. Then it was time to show Jobs the more polished model under the bowl, with the angling weights and mock-ups of buttons on the front to control the software. This time Jobs' pleasure was obvious.

Just right.

There was another surprise to come. Schiller asked, "Can I bring out my thing now?" He left the room and came back with a number of different-size models of a playback device – big ones, tiny ones, in all sorts of shapes. They had one thing in common: a wheel-shaped contraption on the front. The idea, Schiller explained, was that by using a single finger, tracing the circular pathway on the wheel, you could easily scroll through lists – of songs, of artists, of albums. To select something, you'd press the bull's-eye in the center of the wheel. What's more, as your finger moved around, the scrolling speed actually accelerated, so you could go through long lists at a fairly brisk pace.

(Schiller later explained to me that the idea had crystallized at an earlier meeting with Jobs and Rubinstein. "All the other MP3 players had these little Plus and Minus buttons to go down a menu one song at a time. We were going to hold a thousand songs on this thing – you can't hit the Plus button a thousand times! So I figured, if you can't go up, why not go around?")

Jobs asked Fadell if he could build something like Schiller's scroll wheel, and Fadell said he could.

The project was a go.

The formal codename was P-68, but informally, people also used a more evocative term: Dulcimer.

There is no single "father of the iPod." Development was a multitrack process, with Fadell, now on staff, in charge of the actual workings of the device, Robbin heading the software and interface team, Jonathan Ive doing the industrial design, Rubenstein overseeing the project, and Jobs himself rubbernecking as only he could. For specific tasks, Apple drew on experts working elsewhere in the company. Fadell also contracted with key outsiders, notably a San Jose company called PortalPlayer and a small firm of Apple expatriates called Pixo. And, of course, the Apple people had full-contact sessions with Jobs. He would pick up the device and say what he liked and didn't like, and he would fire questions at everyone, pushing hard: "What are you going to do about it?" It was Jobs who told everyone what the device would be called. "He just came in and went, 'iPod,'" says one team member. "We all looked around the room, and that was it. iPod. And we're like, 'Where did that come from?'" (Excellent question, and one that proved increasingly elusive the more I pressed people at Apple. I was finally able to corner Jobs on it, and he said that to the best of his knowledge the name sort of emerged, not exactly in a form of immaculate conception but in a lengthy back-and-forth between him, his marketing people, and TBWAChiatDay. "The ad agency loved it," he told me. But I get the distinct impression that the iPod moniker won out not because of its brilliance but because Jobs had had enough of the naming process and the hour was getting late.)

Sometimes his pronouncements would astound his employees. When one of the designers said that obviously the device should have a power button to turn the unit on and off, he simply said no. And that was it. It was a harsh aesthetic edict on a parallel with his famous refusal to include cursor keys on the original Macintosh keyboard. From Jobs' point of view, all that was needed was forward, back, and pause buttons, arranged around the circumference of the wheel. (After much effort, his team eventually convinced him of the necessity of a fourth button, called Menu, that would move you through the various lists of options.)

In August, the team finally got one of the physical prototypes to play a song. A group of people working late at night took turns listening on a set of headphones from someone's old Sony Walkman. That first song, by the way, was Spiller's "Groovejet (If This Ain't Love)," a house-music dance tune with vocals by the British diva Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

Copy protection wasn't part of iTunes or the iPod, which happily accepted songs in the free-flowing MP3 format. But Jobs was concerned about piracy, so he did take modest steps against it. Until very late in the development phase, the iPod's designers intended not only to let people load songs from their Macintoshes onto the devices but to enable a reverse process: the ability to add songs to a computer from an iPod. But Jobs, convinced that this two-way sync would make it too tempting for people to plug their iPods into a friend's computer to download entire collections of songs, mandated that the sync work only one way. Likewise, Jobs announced one day that iPods would come packaged in an outer wrapping that said: don't steal music. What about other languages? he was asked. "Put multiple languages on it," he said.

Everyone seemed to have a moment of enlightenment when the clouds parted and it was clear that something amazing was emerging. For Jobs, "It all clicked for me when we designed the user interface. We had the wheel, and we started to lay out the menus and argue about this and that, and it took us about a week where we had most of it done, and once you saw the user interface and how easy it was going to be to get around and how well the wheel worked and how well the concepts of the user interface worked, then it was really clear that you'd be able to [navigate through] a thousand songs. Having a thousand songs in your pocket wouldn't be that exciting if you couldn't navigate and access them easily. Once that user interface clicked, it was like, 'Oh my God, this is gonna be so cool.'"

That interface made the iPod experience special even for those who had been intimately involved in designing it. For Stan Ng, the head-slapping moment came when he took his own prototype home for the first time. "I probably had 80 or 90 CDs' worth of music on my Macintosh; transferring down superfast over FireWire and then being able to pick any music, any album, whenever I wanted to was a feeling of freedom, of empowerment. It was just magic. I don't know how else to put it."

While such informal experimentation was the closest thing to market research Apple performed, there were all sorts of tests to make sure that everything worked, especially when the device came into contact with the physical insults it would face from users in the real world. The most fragile piece was the hard drive. "No one had really ever put such a tiny hard drive in a device that was really pocketable," one engineer explains. "So we were doing things like dropping hundreds of disk drives in these models to figure out if they were going to be robust or not." The testers set up robotic arms that methodically dropped the drives – some on their own, some in cases – from different heights to see how far they could fall and survive, like digital crash test dummies. Apple figured that an iPod should be able to withstand a 30-inch tumble, and the dummy disks passed the test.

Just before the launch, the first production iPods arrived, ready for the lucky first wave (like me) who would receive them in advance of the thousands that would be snapped up instantly when Apple began selling them to the public in November 2001.

Looking back on the process, Jobs waxes philosophical. "If there was ever a product that catalyzed Apple's reason for being, it's this," he says. "Because it combines Apple's incredible technology base with Apple's legendary ease of use with Apple's awesome design. Those three things come together in this, and it's like, that's what we do. So if anybody was ever wondering why Apple is on the earth, I would hold up this as a good example."