Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [80]
Digital music players were either big and clunky or small and useless. Most were based on fairly small memory chips, either 32 or 64 MBs 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 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 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.5 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. But Rubinstein knew what to do with it. “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.