• Prototype. Even Apple’s stores were developed like every other product: protoyped, edited, and refined.
• Ask customers. The popular Genius Bar came from customers.
Chapter 7
Case Study: How It All Came Together with the iPod
“Software is the user experience. As the iPod and iTunes prove, it has become the driving technology not just of computers but of consumer electronics.”
—Steve Jobs
The iPod is the product that transformed Apple from a struggling PC company into an electronics powerhouse. How the iPod came together illustrates a lot of the points discussed in previous chapters: It was the product of small teams working closely together. It was born of Jobs’s innovation strategy: the digital hub. Its design was guided by an understanding of the customer experience—how to navigate a big library of digital tunes. It came together through Apple’s iterative design process, and some of the key ideas came from unlikely sources (the scroll wheel was suggested by an advertising executive, not a designer). Many of the key components were sourced from outside the company, but Apple combined them in a unique, innovative way. And it was designed in such secrecy that not even Jobs knew that Apple had already trademarked the iPod name.
But most of all, the iPod was truly a team effort. “We had a lot of brainstorming sessions,” explained one insider. “Products at Apple happen very organically. There [are] lots of meetings, with lots of people, lots of ideas. It’s a team approach.”1
Revisiting the Digital Hub
Necessity is the mother of invention. Apple started writing application software for OS X because other companies balked, and it’s turned out to be another golden opportunity for the company.
In 2000, the iMac was leading the charge for Apple’s comeback, but Jobs’s attempts to persuade developers to write software for OS X was getting a mixed reception.
Jobs’s deal with Bill Gates ensured that Microsoft would produce new versions of Office and its Internet Explorer browser for OS X. But Adobe, one of the biggest software makers for the Mac, had flatly refused to adopt its consumer-level software for OS X.
“They said flat-out no,” Jobs told Fortune magazine. “We were shocked, because they had been a big supporter in the early days of the Mac. But we said, ‘Okay, if nobody wants to help us, we’re just going to have to do this ourselves.’ ”
At the same time, consumers were beginning to buy lots of devices designed to be plugged into computers—Palm Pilots, digital cameras, and camcorders—but in Jobs’s view, there was no good software to manage pictures or edit home movies on either the Mac or Windows.
Jobs figured that if Apple could build software to enhance these devices—to make editing a home movie easy, for instance—customers might buy Macs to manage their pictures, edit video, and synchronize their cell phones. The Mac would become the digital hub of the home, the technology centerpiece to connect all these digital devices.
As described in Chapter 6, Jobs spelled out the PC’s third great age at the 2001 Macworld. “This age is spawned by the proliferation of digital devices everywhere: CD players, MP3 players, cell phones, handheld organizers, digital cameras, digital camcorders, and more. We’re confident that the Mac can be the hub of this new digital lifestyle by adding value to these other devices.”2
The digital hub is a fresh spin on the old “killer apps” strategy that has long driven the technology business. Customers rarely buy computers for the hardware alone; they’re more interested in the software it can run. An exclusive piece of killer software is usually enough to guarantee the success of the machine it runs on. The Apple II was a hit thanks to VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet. Nintendo became a force in the console business thanks to its Mario Brothers games. And the Mac took off only after Adobe developed PostScript, a standard language for documents and printers, which launched the desktop publishing revolution.
Jobs’s digital hub strategy has been a mixed success. The software it inspired—applications like iPhoto, iMovie, and Garageband—have been highly praised by critics, and are regarded by some as the best on any platform. But, on their own, they have failed to attract new users to the Mac in huge numbers. They haven’t proven to be killer apps.
Nonetheless, as corporate strategy, the idea of the computer as a digital hub has been phenomenally successful, and still is.
When most observers were still comparing Apple to Microsoft and couldn’t see beyond the old battle for the enterprise, Jobs focused on consumers and saw the looming digital entertainment revolution. Computers were becoming the key lifestyle technology, not just the key work technology. From the digital hub idea rose Apple’s suite of software apps, which are becoming the lifestyle equivalent of Microsoft’s Office suite. And, as we’ve seen, it also inspired the iPod, the iTunes music store, and Apple’s phenomenally successful retail stores.
Jobs’s Misstep: Customers Wanted Music, Not Video
One of the primary features of the early iMac was its ability to connect to consumer camcorders via a FireWire port. FireWire is standard equipment on many consumer camcorders, and the iMac was one of the first consumer computers designed as a home-video-editing station.
Jobs had long been interested in video, and thought that the iMac had the potential to do for video what the first Mac had done for desktop publishing. The first piece of digital hub software Jobs created was iMovie, an easy-to-use video-editing application.
Trouble is, in the late 1990s, consumers were more interested in digital music than digital video. Jobs was so consumed by video, he didn’t notice the beginnings of the digital music revolution. Jobs has a reputation as a technology seer. Supposedly, he has the ability to divine future technology—the graphical user interface, the mouse, stylish MP3 players—but he totally missed the millions of music lovers who were trading tunes by the billions on Napster and other file-sharing networks. Users were ripping their CD collections and sharing tunes over the Internet. In 2 000, music started migrating from the stereo to the computer. The rush to digital was especially marked in dorm rooms and, though college kids were a big source of iMac sales, Apple had no jukebox software for managing collections of digital music.
In January 2001, Apple announced a loss of $195 million thanks to a general economic downturn and a sharp decline in sales. It was the first and only quarterly loss since Jobs returned. Customers had stopped buying iMacs without CD burners. In a conference call with analysts, Jobs admitted that Apple had “missed the boat” by excluding recordable CD burners from the iMac line.3 He was chastened. “I felt like a dope,” Jobs said later. “I thought we had missed it. We had to work hard to catch up.”4
Other PC makers hadn’t missed it, though. Hewlett-Packard, for one, was shipping CD burners with its computers, a major feature that Apple had to follow. To catch up, Apple licensed a popular music player called SoundJam MP from a small company and hired its hotshot programmer, Jeff Robbin. Under the direction of Jobs, Robbin spent several months retooling SoundJam into iTunes (mostly making it simpler). Jobs introduced it at the Macworld Expo show in January 2001.
“Apple has done what Apple does best: make complex applications easy, and make them even more powerful in the process,” Jobs told the keynote crowd. “And we hope its dramatically simpler user interface will bring even more people into the digital music revolution.”
While Robbin was working on iTunes, Jobs and his executive team started looking at gadgets to see if there were any opportunities. They found that digital cameras and camcorders were pretty well designed, but music players were a different matter. “The products stank,” Greg Joswiak, vice president of iPod product marketing, told Newsweek.5
Digital music players were either big and clunky or small and useless. Most were based on fairly small memory chips, either 32 or 64 Mbytes in size, which allowed them to store only a few dozen songs—not much better than a cheap portable CD player.
But a couple of the players were based on a new 2.5-inch ha
rd drive from Fujitsu. The most popular was the Nomad Jukebox from Singapore-based Creative. 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 USB 1 to transfer songs manually from the computer, which was painfully slow. The interface was an engineer special (unbelievably awful). And it often sucked batteries dry in just forty-five minutes.
Here was Apple’s opportunity.
“I don’t know whose idea it was to do a music player, but Steve jumped on it pretty quick and he asked me to look into it,” said Jon Rubinstein, a veteran engineer who headed up Apple’s hardware division for more than a decade.6 Now the executive chairman of the board at Palm, Rubinstein is a tall, thin New Yorker in his early fifties with a frank, no-bullshit manner and an easy smile.
He joined Apple in 1997 from NeXT, where he’d been Jobs’s hardware guy. 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. When Apple split into separate iPod and Macintosh divisions in 2004, Rubinstein was put in charge of the iPod side, a testament to how important both he and the iPod were to Apple.
Apple’s team knew it could solve most of the problems that plagued the Nomad. Its FireWire connector could quickly transfer songs from computer to player: an entire CD in a few seconds, a huge library of MP3s in minutes. And thanks to the rapidly growing cell phone industry, new batteries and displays were constantly coming to market. This is Jobs’s “vectors in time”—keeping an eye out for advantageous technological advances. Future versions of the iPod could take advantage of improvements in cell phone technology.
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
How the iPod Got Its Name: “Open the Pod Bay Door, Hal!”
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.
Inside Steve's Brain Page 18