Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [81]
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 32MB 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. Pixo was developing an operating system for cell phones, and it 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