Thanks to Napster, music was rapidly turning digital and CD burners were taking off. Apple would be almost the last computer maker to add CD burners to its computers. In an attempt to catch up, the company bought a third-party MP3 jukebox program for the Mac, SoundJam MP, from a small company, Casady & Greene. Apple also hired Casady & Greene’s hotshot programmer, Jeff Robbin.
Robbin’s team relocated to Apple’s HQ and set about retooling SoundJam, stripping out a lot of features to make it accessible to first-time users. Under the direction of Jobs, Robbin spent several months simplifying the program, which Jobs introduced as iTunes at the Macworld Expo in January 2001.
While Robbin was working on iTunes, Jobs and the executives played with ideas for gadgets that could be used in conjunction with the software Apple was developing, including digital cameras and camcorders. An MP3 player seemed a particularly obvious target, partly because the early devices they saw on the market functioned poorly. In the words of Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of hardware marketing: “The products stank.”
They were two kinds of MP3 players in the market at the time. One variety was big, ugly and bricklike, based on a traditional three-inch desktop hard drive; the other, which used expensive flash memory, stored only a few songs. Neither of them worked well with iTunes, but Jobs wondered if there was an opportunity to take advantage of the intelligence built into iTunes. He asked Rubinstein to look into it.
Meanwhile, Jony’s group was already making prototypes of MP3 players. The prototypes were purely experimental, nothing more than concepts for potential products, like Brunner’s Juggernaut project had been. Inspired by the iMac’s see-through plastic design language, the players were based on small flash memory chips, capable of storing about an album’s worth of songs. “These smaller peripheral devices were considered more like extensions of a core ecosystem,” said one former designer. “Engineering was not involved, at least not in these early stages of concept presentations.”
Jony particularly liked an MP3 player that resembled the iMac’s hockey-puck mouse, dressed out in transparent red plastic. Inspired by a yo-yo, the device had a groove around its perimeter for holding the earbud’s wires, which slotted into cutouts on the back. (It looked like a round version of the earbud packaging used with the iPhone 5.) The player was controlled by a series of buttons arranged in a circle, with a small black-and-white screen in the middle. It resembled what, eventually, would be the familiar iPod scroll wheel, but at that time was purely button based with no wheel to turn. Jony’s team made other versions, including some for watching video, but none of the prototypes were very compelling.
At the end of February 2001, Jobs and Rubinstein were in Japan for Macworld Tokyo. Rubinstein took a routine meeting with Toshiba Corporation, one of Apple’s major component suppliers. At the end of their discussion, his hosts showed him a new hard drive, only 1.8 inches in diameter. Though tiny, it had five gigabytes of data storage—enough to hold an astounding one thousand CDs.
The Toshiba engineers didn’t know what to do with the hard drive and asked Rubinstein if they should put it in a camera. Rubinstein smiled but kept his thoughts to himself. He went straight back to the hotel and told Jobs he knew how to build Apple’s MP3 player. All he needed was a ten-million-dollar check.
Jobs told him to go for it, but with a catch: He wanted the new device delivered by Christmas that year, meaning Rubinstein had to have the product ready by August in order to make the marketing cycle for the crucial holiday shopping season. Ruby had six months to come up with Apple’s first MP3 player.
“In Your Pocket”
As Rubinstein remembers, his biggest initial problem was that everybody at Apple, including Jony’s ID group, was already busy with other products. As was usual with such exploratory, blue-sky projects, Apple went looking for an outside consultant.
Someone recommended Tony Fadell, a designer/engineer who specialized in handheld hardware and digital audio. Fadell had worked for General Magic, an Apple spinoff, and developed PDAs for Philips before launching his own start-up, Fuse Networks, in the late 1990s.
Fadell’s twelve-person firm was busy trying to build an MP3 stereo player, a conventional rack-mounted component with a hard drive and CD reader instead of a tape deck or FM radio. Fadell had shopped his idea around without much success, approaching the Swiss watch giant Swatch and Palm Inc. His conversations with Real Networks brought him to Rubinstein’s attention.
Rubinstein phoned Fadell on a ski slope in Aspen, Colorado, and asked him to come in and talk about a project. It was so secret, Rubinstein told him, I can’t tell you what it is. Because it was Apple calling, Fadell agreed.
Only after Fadell signed a confidentiality contract did Rubinstein tell him about iTunes and their desire to build an MP3 player to hook into it. Fadell wasn’t particularly enthusiastic—Apple hadn’t been exactly hot in 2000—but he was flat broke. He’d burned through his start-up’s cash and, because the dot-com bubble had burst, he couldn’t raise any more money. Fadell took the job just so he could pay his team at Fuse.
Rubinstein offered Fadell an eight-week contract to analyze what it would take to build an MP3 player. He had to figure out the battery, screen, chips and other components, plus what kind of team would be required to get it made. When he was done, a feasibility study would be reported to Jobs.
Fadell was assigned an internal contact, hardware marketing manager Stan Ng. The two quickly formulated the design story for the new product. “‘In your pocket’ became the mantra for the product, because that was definitely the size and form factor that hit the sweet spot,” Ng said.1
Fadell identified potential components, mostly from the cell phone industry, which was then rapidly taking off. Based on the size of the components he was looking at, he made mock-ups from glued-together Foam Core. A design emerged: a simple rectangle, about the size of a cigarette pack. Since it felt too light in his hand, he gave it heft by adding some old fishing weights he found in his garage. He flattened them with a hammer, then slid them between the model’s foam boards.
Rubinstein loved the model and, in early April, Fadell and Ng presented it to Steve Jobs and other members of the executive team, including Rubinstein, Robbin and Schiller. Fadell hadn’t met Jobs before, but he’d been coached on how to make sure Jobs picked the right design: Present three options and save the best for last. Fadell had made drawings of the first two mock-ups and brought along his Foam Core model, which he hid under a large wooden bowl that was kept on the long table in the fourth-floor executive conference room.
Ng opened with some slides about the music market and current MP3 players, but a bored Jobs kept interrupting. Fadell took over. He laid all the potential parts on the table, including Toshiba’s 1.8-inch hard drive, a small piece of glass for the screen, various battery alternatives, a sample motherboard. He began talking about pricing curves of memory and hard drive storage, battery technologies and the different kinds of displays.
Then he stood up and showed the meeting a picture of his first concept, which was a big brick of a device with a slot for removable storage. Jobs said it was too complicated.
The next drawing was smaller and held thousands of songs, but it was based on volatile flash memory that would be wiped clean if the battery died. Jobs didn’t like that either, so Fadell went to the table, grabbed all the parts he’d shown earlier, and began snapping them together, like a LEGO model. He handed the electronic sandwich to Jobs. As Jobs turned it over in his hands, Fadell lifted the bowl and gave him the more finished prototype.
Jobs was enthusiastic. Then Phil Schiller surprised everyone when he left the room and returned with several models for an MP3 player that featured a scroll wheel. Schiller explained that a wheel was the best way to navigate quickly through any list, whether of names and addresses or songs. The more you turned the wheel, he explained, the faster the list would scroll, making it quick to get to the bottom of a very long list. He pointed out that to select something, you hit the bull’s-eye in the middle.
Schiller had gotten the idea in a meeting where he’d been examining competing MP3 players. He’d been irritated by having to hit a tiny button hundreds of times to go up and down a menu one song at a time. “You can’t hit the Plus button a thousand times!” he said. “So I figured, if you can’t go up, why not go around?”2He found that scroll wheels were actually fairly common in electronics, from scrolling mice to Palm thumb wheels. Bang & Olufsen BeoCom phones had a dial for navigating lists of phone contacts and calls that resembled the one that eventually became a signature element in the iPod’s design.
Jobs asked Fadell if he could build Schiller’s scroll wheel. Fadell said yes, of course. The project was code-named P-68.
Project Dulcimer
For reasons that no one seems to remember, P-68 came to be known among insiders as “Project Dulcimer.” Jobs had green-lighted it, but one main player on the project, Tony Fadell, not only didn’t work at Apple, he didn’t particularly want to. Fadell pitched Rubinstein on awarding the job to his start-up on a contract basis, but Rubinstein refused. Instead, he extended the reluctant Fadell’s contract.
As the project moved forward, however, Rubinstein got more and more uncomfortable with the arrangement: He wanted Fadell on board full time at Apple. Four weeks after the initial meeting with Jobs, Fadell was slated to present the iPod to a team of twenty-five Apple bigwigs, including Jony (who, at that stage, knew nothing of the new player’s progress). With Fadell busy streamlining his ideas, Rubinstein devised an ultimatum to get him to sign on with Apple.
Before the meeting—with Jony and the others waiting—Rubinstein gave Fadell a choice. If Fadell wasn’t going to take the job, Rubinstein threatened to call off the meeting. If Fadell didn’t sign on to Apple on their terms, it would be the end of the project and the end of the iPod.
Fadell took the meeting and the job.
Once on staff, Fadell assumed charge of the project’s engineering. Robbin headed up the software and interface team, while Rubinstein oversaw everything. The collective responsibility was obvious enough: create a product to satisfy Jobs’s desire for an MP3 player worthy of the Apple marque and to do it by the looming deadline. The team’s newest member, Jony Ive, would be responsible for the look, workmanship and usability of the finished product.
To meet the tight production deadline, Fadell matched up the drive from Toshiba with a cell phone battery and screen from Sony; a stereo digital-to-analog converter from a small Scottish company, Wolfson Microelectronics; a FireWire interface controller from Texas Instruments; a flash memory chip from Sharp Electronics; a power management/battery charging chip from Linear Technologies Inc.; and an MP3 decoder and controller chip from PortalPlayer
Fadell took a trip to Asia to meet with suppliers. He didn’t tell them exactly what they might be building, but presented some vague specs for the work Apple wanted.
The earliest prototypes were built in reinforced Perspex boxes about the size of shoe boxes, which made them easy to debug. The big shoe boxes also helped disguise the fact they were working on a music player, because the team couldn’t tell anyone what they were working on, even inside the company. To further obscure what they were doing, the teams put the buttons and screen in different places each time a new prototype was made. One engineer noted that it was all a silly subterfuge; a single look inside revealed immediately it was a small pocket device.
Jony’s role, as he recalled later, was to help fulfill the design brief they’d been handed for Project Dulcimer. It was, in short, to create something “very, very new.”3
Changing the Game
“From early on we wanted something that would seem so natural and so inevitable and so simple you almost wouldn’t think of it as having been designed,” Jony explained. The shape wasn’t the issue—“it could have been shaped like a banana if we’d wanted.”4
Given the parts of the device (the screen, the chip, the battery), the elements sandwiched naturally together into a box. “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.”5
Jony named Richard Howarth the lead designer, and they used Fadell’s chunk of Foam Core as a reference. The big challenge was to design the user interface. Locating the screen was an issue, and so was whether or not to use buttons. The method of selecting songs was critical. The process inevitably reduced and reduced, resulting in a device with four buttons mounted on a dial.
Jobs worked on the interface with Tim Wasko, a veteran user interface (UI) designer who’d been at NeXT. Wasko was also working with Robbin on the UI for iTunes. He’d previously impressed Jobs with the metallic interface he created for QuickTime 4, which Jobs eventually adopted in most of Apple’s software, so he was given the job of figuring out the UI for the iPod.
He started by mapping out all the options a user would face when selecting a song: the artists, their albums and finally all the songs on a particular album. “When I diagrammed it out it was a series of lists connected to each other,” he said. “It was a question of pressing a button to go down to the next list, and pressing another button to come back up.”6
Wasko created a demo in Adobe Director, a multimedia authoring program, that was pretty simple and straightforward. Before he showed it to Jobs, he replaced the original cursor keys from a keyboard with a USB jog wheel for editing video. The jog wheel had a central dial for scrubbing through video, and several buttons above and below it. Wasko drew paper labels for the four buttons on the bottom (play/pause, backward, forward and menu) and ignored the buttons on top. It worked great. Jobs was delighted with the system but pushed Wasko to get rid of the fourth button. Wasko should have known better. “If you give Steve one thing, he’s going to hate it, even if it’s great,” remembered Wasko. “So you have to make some other crap to put on the table.”
Wasko had brought nothing to sacrifice, and so he tried to find a way to get rid of one of the buttons. He labored for weeks but he just couldn’t find a way to navigate the hierarchy with just three buttons. “We worked our butts off on that thing,” he said.
Jobs finally acquiesced to the extra button, and Wasko took his Mac and jog wheel over to show Jony at the ID studio. “It was a quick meeting,” Wasko said. “They already knew it was going to be a wheel. I just showed Jony how the interface worked.”
