The desire to create a portable digital music player arose directly from the development of iTunes: as more and more Apple execs and engineers started listening to MP3s on their computers, it was only a matter of time before they wanted to take their digital music with them in some sort of portable digital version of the old Sony Walkman. The few pocket-sized MP3 players on the market were poorly designed and clumsy to use. It wasn’t so much that the sound was bad, but instead that the procedures for loading them with music and then finding what you wanted to hear were hopelessly opaque. Steve was proud of iTunes, and especially of how easy it made it for someone to organize and manage large libraries of recorded music. Not one of the existing devices could make the most of his nifty piece of software.
The only solution, the team decided, would be for Apple itself to make something better. It was a gambit that would push the company further out of its comfort zone: the only mass-market consumer electronics product it had ever manufactured was a long-forgotten Apple-branded digital still camera from the Sculley years. Steve himself had been involved in nothing like this since the illegal “blue box” long-distance telephone dialer he and Woz built and sold back in the 1970s. Computers were Apple’s focus and raison d’être. But this group was starting to function at such a high level that they welcomed the challenge of making a new kind of device. And none of them thought a portable music player alone would be transformative, so it seemed like a low-risk gamble. The terminology they used suggested the limits of their ambitions: many of them saw a music player primarily as a “computer peripheral,” like a printer or a Wi-Fi router.
As the head of hardware engineering, Jon Rubinstein always kept his eyes open for new electronic components—processors, disk drives, memory chips, graphics technologies—that might pique Steve’s interest or give Apple a competitive edge. In late 2000, during a trip to Japan, Ruby stopped by Toshiba, the electronic giant that, among other things, made hard drives for personal computers. The Toshiba engineers told Ruby that they wanted to show him the next “big” thing in laptop hard drives—the prototype of a miniature, 5-gigabyte disk drive that wasn’t even two inches in diameter. It could fit into a cigarette pack with plenty of room to spare, and yet was capacious enough to hold thousands of digital files, whether these were images, documents, or, say, songs. Ruby couldn’t believe his eyes. This was the first thing he’d seen that had enough capacity at a small enough size to form the heart of an Apple music player. Unlike the tapes or CDs that you played in Sony’s Walkman or Discman, this hard drive would have enough disk storage to hold copies of perhaps a thousand tracks, rather than just a dozen. And its “random access” capabilities distanced it even more from the likes of a Discman, since it gave you the potential to find a particular song out of that enormous trove almost instantly.
In January 2001, Ruby asked some former Newton engineers to begin work in earnest on some sort of portable audio device around the Toshiba micro-drive. In March he put Tony Fadell, a consulting engineer who had previously worked for Philips NV, in charge of the group. Fadell, an energetic entrepreneur with the build of a college wrestler and the intensity of a high school football coach, had worked at General Magic back in the early 1990s, with Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and Susan Kare, veterans of the original Macintosh team, who had told him horror stories about Steve in his early days. “I expected an overbearing tyrant,” he says, “but he wasn’t like that at all. He didn’t resemble the guy from their stories at all. On the things he cared about he could be very intense, but in general, he was much softer, much more considerate. He wasn’t a crazy micromanager. He trusted his guys.”
No one had any idea what the end product would look like, or how users would control it, or how much it would have to function like a tiny computer itself, or how exactly it would interact with iTunes song libraries on the iMac, or even when it possibly could be shipped. All they knew were the basic requirements: that it would somehow pack the tiny hard drive, an audio amplifier powerful enough to drive headphones, a small screen to display and navigate through the music it contained, a microprocessor or microcontroller to give it enough smarts, software to make it programmable and to help it interact directly with iTunes, and a high-speed FireWire port to let it mate via a cable with a Macintosh, in the space of something that you could easily slip into a front pocket of your Levi’s. Of course it had to look cool and of course Steve wanted it as soon as possible.
In this way, Steve had not changed at all: he still presented his team with outrageous goals that seemed impossibly out of reach. But there were two things that had changed, things that improved the odds that his team could live up to his stretch targets. Steve himself was more willing to reshape his goals as the development process revealed either limitations or new opportunities. And the group he had assembled was the most talented collection of people he had ever worked with, a naturally ambitious crew that knew that Steve encouraged their spirit of constant inquisitiveness and willingness to push boundaries. “What I loved about working for Steve,” says Cue, “is that you learned that you could accomplish the impossible. Again and again.”
Another reason that Steve felt confident that Apple could create a great consumer device was that a successful music player could only be the result of a holistic mix of great hardware and software. The iPod was truly a “whole widget” challenge, as Steve described it. With a crash schedule in hand, Fadell led the group building the iPod, but contributions came from everyone on the executive team, as well as from engineers who worked elsewhere in the company. Turning Ruby’s Toshiba microdrive into the heart of a pocket-sized piece of functioning hardware was not, by any means, the biggest challenge. The hard part was creating a usable device, one that would make those thousand tracks accessible with a click or two of a switch, and that would pair simply and directly with a Mac so its owner could import copies of his iTunes digital music files, along with his custom playlists. It also would be nice to be able to display some information about each track and to take full advantage of iTunes’ ability to sort them by artist, album title, and even genre. To make all that happen, the music player would need enough smarts to host a rudimentary computer database program. The iPod, in other words, would actually be a tiny, specialpurpose computer.
But that was just the beginning. Out of all the various aspects of computing, Steve was always most fascinated with the contact point between a person and a computer. It was the user interface that had made the Macintosh seem the epitome of a personal computer in its time. There were good reasons that Steve found this point of interaction so critical. If the point at which a person interacted with a machine was complicated, he or she would likely never unlock its secrets. Most people don’t care about the innards of their computer—they care only about what’s on the screen, and what they can get to through that screen. Steve understood the profound importance of this from the very beginning of his career. It was part of what distinguished him from so many other computer makers, most of whom were engineers who believed that a rational customer would of course care deeply about the insides of his or her computer. This bias held true nearly two decades after the introduction of Mac. So if Apple could make its portable music device a cinch to interact with, users would revel in portable, programmable music in a way they’d never imagined possible. If Apple couldn’t do so, its machine would be a clunker like all the rest.
Getting the interface right meant blending the right software with the right hardware. Some of the software work was already done, of course: the iTunes application on the Mac was the perfect tool to create the database of music tracks and information to be loaded onto the iPod. But the portable device itself needed its own miniature operating system to provide the software underpinnings of the user interface that would be presented on the screen, much like the Mac OS established the graphical user interface that Mac users operated with a mouse and a keyboard. To accomplish this, the software team mashed up repurposed operating system code from the old New
ton with the rudimentary file management system that Apple had quietly licensed from a tiny startup company called PortalPlayer and some elements from Mac OS X.
Getting the hardware right was harder. This is where Ruby’s hardware guys Jony Ive and his team of designers really showed their mettle. At the suggestion of marketing chief Phil Schiller, they created something known as a “thumb-wheel,” which functioned in some ways like the “scroll-wheel” on many computer mice. The iPod’s thumb-wheel was basically a flat disk that you could rotate clockwise or counterclockwise with your thumb to rapidly navigate up and down the long lists displayed on the screen. The iPod software team gave the thumb-wheel a series of imaginative touches that made it truly intuitive to use. The faster you spun the wheel, the quicker the list would move up or down the list. In the middle of the wheel was a button you clicked to make a choice, just as you clicked the button of a Mac’s mouse. Situated around the perimeter of the thumb-wheel like a rim were other buttons that let you jump forward to the next track, restart a track from the beginning, or jump back to the previous track without having to locate it on the screen.
The breakthrough on the iPod user interface is what ultimately made the product seem so magical and unique. There were plenty of other important software innovations, like the software that enables easy synchronization of the device with a user’s iTunes music collection. But if the team had not cracked the usability problem for navigating a pocket library of hundreds or thousands of tracks, the iPod would never have gotten off the ground. It was a solution that came with ancillary benefits as well. The iPod interface was so well designed that it was able to grow and become even more useful as other technologies in the device improved and became cheaper. And since the thumb-wheel technology was half hardware and half software, it was much easier for Apple to lock in this design advantage with patents and copyrights so tough that no competitor dared try to copy it. Were it primarily a software feature, it would’ve been far more vulnerable to being aped. Once again, Apple had found a beautifully intuitive way to control a complex, intelligent device hidden underneath a gleaming, minimalist exterior. This is where Ive first showed that he could design far more than the shapes of things. He could help design the user experience, too. There was nothing that mattered more to Steve.
BEFITTING THE MEASURED ambitions for the new product, the iPod was introduced at an event held in the tiny Town Hall auditorium at Apple headquarters on October 23, 2001. Reaction from the assembled journalists was anything but measured, however. Following the technology where it led had allowed Steve to create a product with a blend of features that made so much intuitive sense that it would change consumer behavior. The iPod was spectacular and totally unexpected.
To use one was to fall in love with it. Apple gave an iPod to every journalist who attended the October introduction, something it had never done before. These technology writers and reviewers and other cognoscenti wound up raving in print about features Apple hadn’t even touted. The showstopper for many was the iPod’s random-play capability, something Steve initially considered to be of marginal interest. This so-called “shuffle mode” turned the device into the equivalent of a personal radio station that would play only your own music, in a totally unpredictable sequence. If you had a large library, your iPod operating in shuffle mode was a wonderful way to stumble upon music you had forgotten that you even owned. In that way, the iPod helped people rediscover the pleasures of the music itself.
The iPod gave Apple a new jolt of cool and expanded the appeal of its products to a much broader universe of consumers, especially younger buyers. In time, it would prove to be the Walkman, and then some, of the early twenty-first century. It was also the first new hardware link in a chain of successive innovative and self-reinforcing software and hardware and network products that started pouring forth once Apple got serious about making the Macintosh a genuine digital hub. Slowly, the iPod proved to be the product that would begin to turn Apple back into a growth company. “We followed where our own desires led us,” Steve explained, recalling how much his team had hated the existing music players on the market, “and we ended up ahead.”
Even the iPod tested Steve’s faith in consumers, however. It took them a while to fully warm to the device. It presented an unfamiliar method of interacting with music, and its $399 price was a significant impediment, especially when you could buy a Sony Discman CD player for under $100. Sales started out on the slow side: Apple sold just 150,000 iPods during the first quarter they were available. One year later, Steve cut the price of that first iPod by $100 and introduced a second version with twice as much capacity and a new “touch-wheel” that was a wheel in shape only—it was actually a circular touch-pad that moved users through their music even more smoothly than the mechanical thumb-wheel, and wasn’t nearly as prone to break. That second introduction was the first clear outward signal that iPod had transformed more than just the experience of listening to music—it had revitalized Apple’s capabilities as a manufacturer as well. The iPod had accelerated Apple’s creative metabolism, instilling a new organizational discipline that would make the promise of frequent, market-churning, incremental improvements—the kind that Bill Gates had lectured Steve about in that joint interview in Palo Alto a decade before—into a breathtaking new kind of rapid-fire technological innovation.
The iPod had led Apple to a newfound ability to keep outdoing itself almost like clockwork. Some of this required execution at a very high level. The iPod’s low price (at least compared to Apple’s computers), forced Apple to learn how to ensure high-quality manufacturing at higher unit volumes than Apple had ever delivered before. These new demands on manufacturing were exacerbated by the competitive dynamics of the consumer electronics market, which expected Apple to refresh the iPod product line far more frequently than its computers. To churn out iPods this way, Apple had to develop disciplines that would fundamentally transform the company into a much more capable enterprise. Tim Cook had to build up an extensive international supply chain, and he and Ruby had to develop relationships with a set of Asian factories capable of delivering lots of high-quality machines in record times. The iPod had quickened the company’s metabolism in a way that would pay off for years to come.
But outdoing itself also required Apple’s top execs—and Steve himself—to think about the future in a new way, with a willingness to follow the technology wherever it might lead. “Learning about new technologies and markets is what makes this fun for me and for everyone at Apple,” Steve once told me, a few years after the iPod’s debut. “By definition, it’s just what we do, and there are lots of ways to do it. Five or six years ago we didn’t know anything about video editing, so we bought a company to learn how to do that. Then we didn’t know anything about MP3 players, but our people are smart. They went out and figured it out by looking at what was already out there with a very critical eye, and then they combined that with what we already knew about design, user interface, materials, and digital electronics. The truth is, we’d get bored otherwise.” In another interview, Steve said, “Who cares where the good ideas come from? If you’re paying attention you’ll notice them.” When his focus had been directed entirely on fixing Apple’s own problems, Steve had almost missed the digital music revolution. Now that Apple was on more solid footing, he was focused outward again, and paying attention very carefully. “When I came back, Apple was like a person who was ill and couldn’t go out and do or learn anything,” Steve explained. “But we made it healthy again, and have increased its strength. Now, figuring out new things to do is what keeps us going.”
At Home and Behind the Scenes
After their historic 1991 interview for Fortune at Steve’s home, Bill Gates and Jobs paused to get their photograph taken with Brent Schlender in the backyard. Bitter competitors at times who publicly sneered at each other repeatedly, Gates and Jobs eventually came around to a mutual respect. © George Lange
At NeXT, Jobs hosted annual picnics for the s
taff. Schlender attended one in 1987 with his daughter, Greta. © Ed Kashi/VII
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Steve relied on software chief Avie Tevanian as much as anyone. While Apple’s hardware won most of the kudos, its software—especially Tevanian’s masterpiece, OSX—laid the foundation for recovery. Courtesy of Brent Schlender
User interface designers watch as Steve reviews the details of OSX in 2001, shortly before its release in beta form. Later during this session, Steve would exclaim, “It looks good enough to lick!” and then lean forward and actually lick the screen. Courtesy of Brent Schlender
Pixar employees called their new headquarters in Emeryville “Steve’s movie,” because he invested so much time in its creation. Here he leads Schlender on a private tour of the grounds in 2000, shortly before it opened. He took pride in the “random” pattern of the bricks on the wall ahead of him, which had been meticulously arranged to appear random. Courtesy of Brent Schlender
Rehearsals for product presentations were always intense. Here, the day before a MacWorld Tokyo affair in February 2001, Jobs festers while he and marketing chief Phil Schiller wait for a technical problem to be solved. Courtesy of Brent Schlender
Becoming Steve Jobs Page 30