http://www.wired.com/news/columns/cultofmac/0,71956-0.html?tw=rss.index

Quote :

"Thanks to Apple Computer's penchant for CIA-like secrecy, there are several myths concerning the birth of the iPod. One of these myths is that the iPod has a father -- one man who conceived and nurtured the iconic device. Steve Jobs, of course, is one candidate; but engineer Tony Fadell has also been named the father of the iPod, as has Jon Rubinstein, the former head of Apple's hardware division. While they all played key roles in the iPod's development, the iPod was truly a team effort. Here's the story: In 2000, Steve Jobs' candy-colored iMac was leading the charge for Apple's comeback, but to further spur sales, the company started asking, "What can we do to make more people buy Macintoshes?" Music lovers were trading tunes like crazy on Napster. They were attaching speakers to their computers and ripping CDs. The rush to digital was especially marked in dorm rooms -- a big source of iMac sales -- but Apple had no jukebox software for managing digital music. To catch up with this revolution, Apple licensed the SoundJam MP music player 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 in January 2001. While Robbin was working on iTunes, Jobs and Co. started looking for gadget opportunities. They found that digital cameras and camcorders were pretty well designed and sold well, but music players were a different matter. "The products stank," Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of iPod product marketing, told Newsweek. Digital music players were either big and clunky or small and useless. Most were based on fairly small memory chips, either 32 or 64 MB, which stored 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 hard 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 Universal Serial Bus to transfer songs from the computer, which was painfully slow. The interface was an engineer special (unbelievably awful) and it often sucked batteries dry in just 45 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, the veteran Apple engineer who's been responsible for most of the company's hardware in the last 10 years. Now retired, Rubinstein joined Apple in 1997. He'd previously worked at NeXT, where he'd been Steve Jobs' 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 plagued by the Nomad. Its FireWire connector could quickly transfer songs from the 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. In February 2001, during the Macworld show in Tokyo, Rubinstein made a visit to Toshiba, Apple's supplier of hard drives, where executives showed him a tiny drive the company had just developed. The drive was 1.8 inches in diameter -- considerably smaller than the 2.5-inch Fujitsu drive used in competing players -- but Toshiba didn't have any idea 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 Fadell -- to hash out the details. Fadell had a lot of experience making handheld devices: He'd developed popular gadgets for General Magic and Philips. A mutual acquaintance gave his number to Rubinstein. "I called Tony," Rubinstein said. "He was on the ski slope at the time. I didn't tell him what he was going to work on. Until he walked in the door, he didn't know what he was going to be working on." Jobs wanted a player in shops by 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 team took as many parts as possible off the shelf: the drive from Toshiba, a battery from Sony, some control chips from Texas Instruments. "

10/17/2006 12:45:00 PM

Quote :

" The basic hardware blueprint was bought from Silicon Valley startup PortalPlayer, which was working on "reference designs" for several different digital players, including a full-size 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," Rubinstein said. "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." One of the biggest problems 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's called on to load more songs. While other manufacturers used a similar architecture for skip protection, the first iPod had a 32-MB memory buffer, which allowed batteries to stretch 10 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, Apple's vice president of industrial design, made prototype after prototype. ''Steve made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content,'' Ive told The New York Times. ''It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device -- which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren't obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.'' Ive told the Times that the key to the iPod wasn't sudden flashes of genius, but the design process. His design group collaborated closely with manufacturers and engineers, constantly tweaking and refining the design. ''It's not serial,'' he told the Times. ''It's not one person passing something on to the next.'' Robert Brunner, a partner at design firm Pentagram and former head of Apple's design group, said Apple's designers mimic the manufacturing process as they crank out prototypes. "Apple's designers spend 10 percent of their time doing traditional industrial design: coming up with ideas, drawing, making models, brainstorming," he said. "They spend 90 percent of their time working with manufacturing, figuring out how to implement their ideas." To make them easy to debug, prototypes were built inside polycarbonate containers about the size of a large shoebox. The iPod's basic software was also brought in -- from Pixo, which was working on an operating system for cell phones. On top of Pixo's low-level system, Apple built the iPod's celebrated user interface. 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 competing players. Schiller's scroll wheel didn't come from the blue, however; scroll wheels are pretty common in electronics, from scrolling mice to Palm thumb wheels. Bang & Olufsen BeoCom phones have an 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. The interface was mocked up by Tim Wasko, an interactive designer who came to Apple from NeXT, where he had worked with Jobs. Wasko 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. The output of a committee is a function of the quality of its members and how they're led. As the iPod came together, it garnered more and more attention from Jobs, whose insistence on excellence and high standards are stamped onto the gadget as indelibly as Apple's logo. "Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like," Jobs told the Times. "That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." Jobs insisted the iPod work seamlessly with iTunes, and that many functions should be automated, especially transferring songs. The model was Palm's HotSync software. "Plug it in. Whirrrrrr. Done," Jobs told Fortune. The iPod name came from an earlier Apple project to build an internet kiosk, which never saw the light of day. On July 24, 2000, Apple registered the iPod name for "a public internet kiosk enclosure containing computer equipment," according to the filing. "The name 'iPod' makes much more sense for an internet kiosk, which is a pod for a human, than a music player," said Athol Foden, a naming expert and president of Brighter Naming of Mountain View, California. But Foden said the name is a stroke of genius: It is simple, memorable and, crucially, it doesn't describe the device, so it can still be used as the technology evolves, even if the device's function changes. He noted the "i" prefix has a double meaning: It can mean "internet," as in "iMac," or it can denote the first person: "I," as in me. "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." On Oct. 23, 2001, about five weeks after 9/11, Jobs introduced the finished product at a special event at Apple's HQ. "This is a major, major breakthrough," Jobs told the assembled reporters. "

10/17/2006 12:46:05 PM

can't believe i read all of that

10/17/2006 1:40:32 PM

i didn't read any of it...no matter how it was developed, it's still overpriced and oversexed

10/17/2006 1:48:06 PM

just like your mom!

10/17/2006 1:51:17 PM

no doubt...but hey, puts food on the table

10/17/2006 1:51:40 PM

Zen > iPod

10/17/2006 2:09:41 PM

if you like bricks then sure

10/17/2006 2:12:41 PM

Whether you love it or hate it personally, it took Apple as a company to a new level.

10/17/2006 2:15:59 PM

unfortunately, this is true

10/17/2006 2:18:56 PM

it took apple and digital music to whole new level. its helping kill off cds faster than before.
love or hate apple/ipod, its great for technology.

and damn that new ipod nano is badass. show me a music player that on the same level as that thing.

10/17/2006 2:43:24 PM

i don't see how the ipod took digital music to a new level...as noted in the article, napster was already around and damned if i've seen software since that rivals that old napster, itunes included

as for the ipod itself, my gf has one (i do not), but i'll be damned if i'll pay twice as much money for the same damn thing...i've yet to figure out what everone likes about it (except for the gay colors and its high scratchability)...my 5gb muvo has better navigation, the ability to play playlists (hers doesn't, but maybe the new ones do?), and can play wma's (which have a higher sound quality for the bitrate than anything else available)...i can also listen to radio on my muvo (yes, i realize this isn't a HUGE deal, but since it cost me nothing extra, and i've used it a couple of times, i count it as a pro)

10/17/2006 4:42:43 PM

Quote :

"damned if i've seen software since that rivals that old napster"

Audiogalaxy was ten times the p2p music service that the original Napster was.

10/17/2006 4:44:33 PM

http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=16185&page=1&pagepos=3

haha

10/17/2006 5:30:56 PM

Quote :

"i don't see how the ipod took digital music to a new level...as noted in the article, napster was already around and damned if i've seen software since that rivals that old napster, itunes included"

how are you going to compare p2p downloading software with a music jukebox program? totally different software. and napster was the shit in its day...i used to dl shit on dial up all night long.
but napster and the ipod were two totally different products...i would argue that itunes drove the digital music revolution more than napster because it put mp3 players in the hands of millions, who then in turn needed (legal) ways to fill it with digital music.

Quote :

"Audiogalaxy was ten times the p2p music service that the original Napster was."

Agreed, audigalaxy had more of the community feel of today's web2.0 programs. napster was yesterdays bearshare or limewire...it was groundbreaking, but not the be all end all. audiogalaxy introduced me to all kinds of new music.

Quote :

"as for the ipod itself, my gf has one (i do not), but i'll be damned if i'll pay twice as much money for the same damn thing...i've yet to figure out what everone likes about it"

And as far as muvo vs nano goes, heres one major sales driver:

Muvo: WxHxD: 2.63" x 2.61" x 0.787"
iPode Nano: WxHxD: 1.6" x 3.5" x 0.26"

Also I'm pretty sure the nano has tons more battery life.



But in general, looking at the quote in your profile page, its obvious why you hate apple and its products so much:

Quote :

"industry giant Microsoft Corporation... a company that has become successful without resorting to software testing"

I know its fun to hate the big guy, the popular choice. You keep using linux, firefox and the muvo. keep fighting the good fight For the majority of Americans though (myself excluded), they like easy to use products so they'll keep using windows, ie and the ipod. beautifully simple design counts for alot these days.

I don't own a single apple product but i can still appreciate what they have accomplished with the ipod and how their successes are good for technology in general.

10/17/2006 6:31:22 PM

Quote :

""industry giant Microsoft Corporation... a company that has become successful without resorting to software testing""

clearly... i guess that's why there are so many security updates for Windows. they forgot to test their crap first.

10/17/2006 6:35:13 PM

Quote :

"You keep using linux, firefox and the muvo. keep fighting the good fight"

damn skippy...though ubuntu is pissing me right now

and my muvo gets 16-18 hours of life per charge (i've disabled the backlight)...i also bought a second battery for $9 including shipping from ebay so i count that as a pro

10/17/2006 6:52:46 PM

Quote :

"they like easy to use products so they'll keep using windowsOSX, iefirefox and the ipod"

[Edited on October 17, 2006 at 7:49 PM. Reason : b]

10/17/2006 7:48:39 PM

^ the majority of americans use those products?

10/17/2006 10:51:58 PM

steve jobs gave birth to it out of his womb

10/17/2006 11:10:11 PM

I can't believe I read all that. There's nothing remarkable about that story at all. It's just a giant faceless corporation working as it should to sell off-the-shelf parts for a premium price. Yawn.

10/18/2006 12:24:35 AM

someone needs to do something about those big, evil corporations!

10/18/2006 8:28:53 AM

sir on what shelf do you find ipod components

are they near the staplers or the sharpies

10/18/2006 8:30:52 AM

Quote :

"clearly... i guess that's why there are so many security updates for Windows. they forgot to test their crap first. "

If you had the choice between paying several people to test your program and people paying you to test your program which would you choose?

10/18/2006 9:17:49 AM

I agree that the article did not shed too much light on the actual process. But worse, the author did a fair bit of editorializing and word trickery to help make the pro-Apple case.
(this is coming from an Apple fan, iPod and Mac owner)

Quote :

"[The Nomad Jukebox] used Universal Serial Bus to transfer songs from the computer"

"It used Universal Serial Bus"? please, who says that? The Nomad used USB, a term which most everyone is familiar with, but not many people know what it stands for. he pulled it out to "Universal Serial Bus" to purposefully confuse the reader into making them think that either 1) the Nomad used some kind of non-standard interface, and/or 2) it used an RS232 Serial (or just "serial") interface, a more widely known term that people associate with very slow transfers. He didn't want to just write "USB", because people with iPods know that they use USB too, just later, faster versions.

and while most people now, and maybe then, would agree with this:
"which was painfully slow. The interface was an engineer special (unbelievably awful)"
it's still an editorial, and does not belong in a regular article, unless it's a quote from someone else.

10/18/2006 9:42:49 AM

Did the Nomad use USB 1.0/1.1? If so, compared to Firewire the transfer rate must have been painfully slow. But it was only painfully slow because we're used to faster transfer rates these days.

i thought editorials were the place to express opinions like that...his opinion on the interface and general use of the product?

10/18/2006 10:35:57 AM

The first nomad jukeboxes used 1.0/1.1. This was back when you'd be hard pressed to find a firewire port on a PC. Then creative tried to really push firewire into all their products. Newer generation nomads were all firewire and when the SB audigy came out they put a firewire port on it. These audigys also have internal 4 pin firewire ports that creative had planned to use for future internal creative branded HDDs and other devices. But that completely failed and USB 2.0 made firewire on PCs a moot point.

As for the interfaces, it wasn't the design that was the problem. You selected songs by artist, title, or whatever. The problem was it was painfully slow to navigate at times.

Although if you want to talk about bad software, iTunes is fucking awful.

10/18/2006 11:00:19 AM

Quote :

"Although if you want to talk about bad software, iTunes is fucking awful."

what makes it fucking awful?

10/18/2006 12:24:49 PM

the UI, the bugs, the way it does things, and how bloated it is.

10/18/2006 12:37:39 PM

nm - saw the link up above me

[Edited on October 18, 2006 at 1:15 PM. Reason : .]

10/18/2006 1:15:25 PM

Quote :

"i thought editorials were the place to express opinions like that"

ok, well now that I look at it closer, it is a column, not an article, so he is justified in editorializing and interjecting his own opinion.

Quote :

"the UI, the bugs, the way it does things, and how bloated it is."

ah yes... "the way it does things". such a good argument.

"I HATE [WINDOWS/MAC/IPODS/ITUNES/LINUX]!!!! IT SUX!"
"why?"
"oh, you know.... because of the way it does things"


"the UI", "it's buggy", and "it's bloated" are also good fallbacks for when you can't find anything particular wrong with it.

10/18/2006 1:28:27 PM

Quote :

"I don't own a single apple product but i can still appreciate what they have accomplished with the ipod and how their successes are good for technology in general."

This is why I like synapse. What a level headed guy.

Quote :

" "It used Universal Serial Bus"? please, who says that? The Nomad used USB, a term which most everyone is familiar with, but not many people know what it stands for. he pulled it out to "Universal Serial Bus" to purposefully confuse the reader into making them think that either 1) the Nomad used some kind of non-standard interface, and/or 2) it used an RS232 Serial (or just "serial") interface, a more widely known term that people associate with very slow transfers. He didn't want to just write "USB", because people with iPods know that they use USB too, just later, faster versions. "

I noticed that too. That was pretty underhanded.

10/19/2006 10:59:27 AM

Quote :

"because of the way it does things""

Meaning the way it functions as a media player. Everything from the default settings to the way it organizes playlists. As a media player it sucks. And if you dont think UI, bloat, and bugs are valid reasons for critisizing software you're a retard.

Im arguing itunes sucks as a media player the way shit sucks as source of nutrients.

10/19/2006 11:53:35 AM

UI, bugs, and bloat are perfectly legitimate reasons to critisize software. But those are just categories of problems, not actual problems themselves. Uninformed people love to talk about bugs in MS products like Windows and Office. But when was the last time they actually encountered a bug, and not something that they didn't understand or a feature that didn't work how they wanted it to?
So, what "bugs" have you found in iTunes? Did you submit them to Apple? did you see if other people are experiencing the same problems? Are they reproduceable?

The UI - what about it? that's fine if it just doesn't tickle your fancy. no software is going to please everyone. But what exactly is wrong? don't like the icons? the button placement? the frames? the fonts?

Bloat is another problem that people automatically assign to software that they don't like but can't pinpoint any specifics. How do you know its bloated? Did it take too long to download for you, or does it just take too long to start up? Is it just too overloaded with features that you don't use? Or do you, with your all knowing programming prowess, just think that Apple software engineers should have been able to squeeze an extra MB or two out of the package size if only "they weren't so lazy".

10/19/2006 12:07:50 PM

Bugs like it crashes when trying to play video or audio. (this has been a problem since quicktime was written for windows).
Bugs like after a certain ammount of play time if you leave it open the audio starts crackling.

The reasons I dont like the UI are all individual prefrence.

But bloat like unnecisary extra services that it installs on my comp.
Bloat like the way it takes 2x the ram and cpu to decode h.264 that other codecs or players do.

And then there are other things, like the way that if you dont know better it will fuck your media library if you import it into itunes.

And these are just off the top of my head things. Its a bad media player. Its a good HEY BUY THIS SONG AND PUT IT ON UR IPOD software. Although if I had an iPod i probably wouldn't use itunes to manage the songs on it.

10/19/2006 12:22:37 PM

10/20/2006 9:46:27 AM