In February 2001, during the annual Macworld Expo in Tokyo, Rubinstein made a routine visit to Toshiba, Apple’s supplier of hard drives, where executives showed him a tiny new drive they’d just developed. The drive was just 1.8 inches in diameter—considerably smaller than the 2.5-inch Fujitsu drive used in competing players—but Toshiba didn’t have any ideas what it might be used for. “They said they didn’t know what to do with it. Maybe put it in a small notebook,” Rubinstein recalled. “I went back to Steve and I said, ‘I know how to do this. I’ve got all the parts.’ He said, ‘Go for it.’ ”
“Jon’s very good at seeing a technology and very quickly assessing how good it is,” Joswiak told
Cornell Engineering Magazine
. “The iPod’s a great example of Jon seeing a piece of technology’s potential: that very, very small form-factor hard drive.”
Rubinstein didn’t want to distract any of the engineers working on new Macs, so in February 2001 he hired a consultant, engineer Tony Fadell, to hash out the details. Fadell had a lot of experience making handheld devices: he’d developed popular gadgets for both General Magic and Philips. A mutual acquaintance gave his phone number to Rubinstein. “I called Tony,” Rubinstein said. “He was on the ski slope at the time. Until he walked in the door, he didn’t know what he was going to be working on.”
Jobs wanted a player in stores by the fall, before the holiday shopping season. Fadell was put in charge of a small team of engineers and designers, who put the device together quickly. The iPod was built under a shroud of intense secrecy, Rubinstein said. From beginning to end, among the seven thousand staff that worked at Apple HQ at the time, only fifty to one hundred even knew of the existence of the iPod project. To complete the project as quickly as possible, 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.
The basic hardware blueprint was bought from a Silicon Valley startup called PortalPlayer, which was working on so-called reference designs for several different digital players, including a full-sized unit for the living room and a portable player about the size of a pack of cigarettes.
The team also drew heavily on Apple’s in-house expertise. “We didn’t start from scratch,” said Rubinstein. “We’ve got a hardware engineering group at our disposal. We need a power supply, we’ve got a power supply group. We need a display, we’ve got a display group. We used the architecture team. This was a highly leveraged product from the technologies we already had in place.”
The thorniest problem 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 was called on to load more songs. While other manufacturers used a similar architecture for skip protection, the first iPod had a 32-Mbyte memory buffer, which allowed batteries to stretch ten 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.
“Sometimes things are really clear from the materials they are made from, and this was one of those times,” said Rubinstein. “It was obvious how it was going to look when it was put together.”
Nonetheless, Apple’s design group, headed by Jonathan Ive, made prototype after prototype. Ive’s design group collaborated closely with manufacturers and engineers, constantly tweaking and refining the design.
To make them easy to debug, the early iPod prototypes were built inside big polycarbonate containers about the size of a big shoebox, known as “stealth units.” Like a lot of Silicon Valley companies, Apple is subject to industrial espionage from rivals who would love to get a peek at what it’s working on. Some observers have suggested that the polycarbonate boxes disguised the prototypes from would-be spies. But engineers say the boxes are purely functional: they’re big and accessible, and easy to debug if there’s a problem.
To save time developing the iPod’s software, a basic low-level operating system was also brought in to provide a foundation on which to build. The software was licensed from Pixo, a Silicon Valley startup founded by Paul Mercer, a former Apple engineer who’d worked on the Newton, that was developing an operating system for cell phones. The Pixo system was very low level: it handled things like calls to the hard drive for music files. It also contained libraries for building interfaces, with commands for drawing lines or boxes on a screen. It didn’t include a finished user interface. Apple built the iPod’s celebrated user interface on top of Pixo’s low-level system.
The idea for the scroll wheel was suggested by Apple’s head of marketing, Phil Schiller, who in an early meeting said quite definitively, “The wheel is the right user interface for this product.” Schiller also suggested that menus should scroll faster the longer the wheel is turned, a stroke of genius that distinguishes the iPod from the agony of using competing players. The idea for the scroll wheel might not have been suggested had Apple followed the traditional serial design process.
The iPod’s scroll wheel was its most distinguishing feature. Using a wheel to control an MP3 player was, at the time, unprecedented, but it was surprisingly functional. Competing MP3 players used standard buttons. The scroll wheel appears to have been an act of magical creation. Why hadn’t anyone come up with a control device like this before? Schiller’s scroll wheel didn’t come out of the blue, however; scroll wheels are pretty common in electronics, from mice with scroll wheels to the thumb wheels on the side of some Palm Pilots. Bang & Olufsen BeoCom phones have a very familiar iPod-like dial for navigating lists of phone contacts and calls. Back in 1983, the Hewlett-Packard 9836 workstation had a keyboard with a similar wheel for scrolling text.
On the software side, Jobs charged programmer Jeff Robbin with overseeing the iPod’s interface and interaction with iTunes. The interface was mocked up by designer Tim Wasko, the interactive designer who had previously been responsible for the clean, simple interface in Apple’s QuickTime player. Like the hardware designers, Wasko designed mockup after mockup, presenting the variations on large glossy printouts that could be spread over a conference table to be quickly sorted and discussed.
“I remember sitting with Steve and some other people night after night from nine until one, working out the user interface for the first iPod,” said Robbin. “It evolved by trial and error into something a little simpler every day. We knew we had reached the end when we looked at each other and said, ‘Well, of course. Why would we want to do it any other way?’ ”
7
Like Jonny Ive’s hardware prototypes, the iPod’s intuitive interface was arrived at through an iterative trial-and-error design process.
Jobs insisted that the iPod work seamlessly with iTunes, and that many functions should be automated, especially transferring songs. The model was the Palm’s HotSync software, which automatically updates the Palm Pilots when they’re hooked up. Users should be able to plug their iPod into the computer and have songs load automatically onto the player—no user intervention required. This ease of use is one of the great unheralded secrets of the iPod’s success. Unlike players before it, the iPod and iTunes alleviated the pain of managing a digital music collection. Most competing players made the user do a lot of work. To load songs, they had to manually drag tunes onto an icon of their MP3 player. It was a pain in the rear, and not something most people wanted to do with their time. The iPod changed that. Here’s how Jobs summed up the iPod’s easy operation to
Fortune
in five easy words: “Plug it in. Whirrrrrr. Done.”
8
While Apple’s engineers finalized the hardware, and Robbin and company worked on iTunes, a freelance copywriter was working on a name for the new device. The iPod name was offered up by Vinnie Chieco, a freelancer who lives in San Francisco, and Jobs initially rejected it.
Chieco was recruited by Apple to be part of a small team tasked with helping to figure out how to introduce the new MP3 player to the general public, not just to computer geeks. The task involved finding a name for the device, as well as creating marketing and display material to explain what it could do.
Chieco consulted with Apple for several months, sometimes meeting Jobs two or three times a week while working on the iPod. The four-man team worked in strict secrecy, meeting in a small, windowless office at the top of the building that houses Apple’s graphic design department. The room was locked electronically, and only four people had access keys, including Jobs. The room had a big meeting table and a couple of computers. Some of their ideas were posted up on the walls.
The graphic design department is charged with designing Apple’s product packaging, brochures, trade-show banners, and store signage, among many other things. The graphics department has a privileged position within Apple’s organization: it often finds out about Apple’s secret products well in advance of launch. To preserve secrecy, Apple is highly compartmentalized. Like a covert government agency, employees are given information on a strictly need-to-know-basis. Various departments know bits and pieces about new products, but only the executive team is furnished with all the details.
To prepare packaging and signage materials, artists and designers in the graphics department are often the first to learn new product details, after the executive team. The graphics department, for example, was one of the first groups inside Apple to learn the iPod’s name, so that it could prepare the packaging. The other groups working on the iPod—including the hardware and the software teams—knew the device only by its code name, “Dulcimer.” Even within the graphics department, information was strictly rationed. The department has about one hundred staff, but only a small subset—about twenty or thirty people—knew of the iPod’s existence at all, let alone all of its details. The rest of the department found out about the iPod when Jobs unveiled it publicly to the press in October 2001.
During the process of finding a name, Jobs settled on the player’s descriptive tag line: “1,000 songs in your pocket.” This descriptive tag line freed up the name from having to be explanatory; it didn’t have to reference music or songs. 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, which prompted Chieco to start thinking about hubs: objects to which other things connect.
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.“As soon as I saw the white iPod, I thought ‘
2001
,’ ” said Chieco. “ ‘Open the pod bay door, Hal!’ ”
Then it was just a matter of adding the “i” prefix, like the iMac. When Apple first started using the prefix in 1999 with the iMac, Apple said the “i” stood for “internet.” But the prefix is now used across such a wide range of products—from the iPhone to iMovie software—it no longer makes as much sense. Some have suggested that the “i” is the first person, denoting the personal nature of Apple’s products.
Chieco presented the name to Jobs along with several dozen alternatives written on index cards. He declined to mention any of the alternative names that were considered. As he examined the index cards one-by-one, Jobs sorted them into two piles: one for candidates, the other for rejects. The iPod card went into the reject pile. But at the end of the meeting, Jobs asked the four people present for their opinions. Chieco reached across the table and pulled the "iPod” card from the reject pile. “The way Steve had been explaining this, it made sense to me,” said Chieco. “It was the perfect analogy. It was very logical. Plus, it was a good name.” Jobs told Chieco he’d think about it.
After the meeting, Jobs began market testing several alternative names on people inside and outside the company whom he trusted. “He was throwing out a whole lot of names,” said Chieco. “He had a lot. He started to ask around.” A few days later, Jobs informed Chieco that he’d made a decision in favor of "iPod. He didn’t offer an explanation. He simply told Chieco: “I’ve been thinking about that name. I like it. It’s a good name.” A source at Apple, who asked not be to be named (because he doesn’t want to be fired), confirmed Chieco’s story.
Athol Foden, a naming expert and president of Brighter Naming of Mountain View, California, noted that Apple had already trademarked the iPod name on July 24, 2000, for an Internet kiosk, a project that never saw the light of day. Apple registered the iPod name for “a public internet kiosk enclosure containing computer equipment,” according to the filing.
Foden noted that the name "iPod” makes more sense for an Internet kiosk, which is a pod for a human, than a music player. “They discovered in their tool chest of registered names they had ’iPod,’ ” he said. “If you think about the product, it doesn’t really fit. But it doesn’t matter. It’s short and sweet.”
Foden said the name is a stroke of genius: It is simple, memorable, and, crucially, doesn’t describe the device, so it can still be used as the technology evolves, even if the device’s function changes. He also noted the double meaning of the “i” prefix: “internet,” as in "iMac,” or the first person “I,” as in me.
Chieco was puzzled when I told him that Apple had already registered the iPod name. He wasn’t aware of it, and neither, apparently, was Steve Jobs. Chieco said the Internet kiosk must be a coincidence. He suggested that maybe another team at Apple registered the name for a different project, but because of the company’s penchant for secrecy, no one was aware that it was already one of their trademarks.