Happy 10th Birthday, iPod

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Apple launched the first-ever iPod on October 23, 2001. Back then, it was a little-known project, and one that was predicted to be doomed to failure. But ten years and 304 million devices sold later, the iPod has proved to be one of Apple’s crown jewels.

Apple was in a precarious position in 2001, as was the rest of the technology industry. The company was barely breaking even, and analysts wondered if it was smart for a computer company to enter into an entirely different market — music and media players.

Even back in 1999, Steve Jobs was said to have discovered a latent potential application for speedy wired transfers that FireWire offered, amid the slow USB 1.1 transfers that made loading media into media players made for Windows difficult. The rise of illegal MP3 downloads also opened up possibilities — Internet-downloaded music was seen as the future of music distribution, and Apple wanted to create a legal industry around this trend.

During this time, Apple acquired SoundJam MP and hired its creators to work on an Apple-branded digital music app. The company also assigned VP for hardware Jon Rubenstein to head up development of the company’s own music player, which will address the need for a digital media player that was not like others currently in the market, which Steve Jobs called “crap.”

Rubenstein hired Tony Fadell, who formerly worked on WindowsCE-based PDAs, to work on a new secret project, by Apple. His six-week contract turned into a long-term employment deal after he successfully presented three mock-ups of the media player to Apple executives. The eventual design would be a mix of one of Fadell’s prototypes (which was a “surprise” mockup hidden underneath one of Steve Jobs’ decorative bamboo bowls) and one of senior VP for marketing Phil Schiller’s own designs, with a clickwheel.

In designing the iPod, Apple wanted the device to “just work,” without a complicated user interface. The clickwheel was meant to address the difficulty of navigating through thousands of tracks, which would otherwise require a lot of key presses. The lack of a removable battery and even an on/off switch added to the “magic” that surrounded the iPod.

The iPod team only had six months to produce the device, to meet the target holiday season launch. Fadell then outsourced some of the component work, and hired a few engineers from his own startup, Fuse Systems. The team almost didn’t make it, as the events of 9/11 made air travel difficult. Fortunately, engineers who were bringing in iPod prototypes from Taiwan made it just in time, prior to the nationwide air travel shutdown.

The rest, as they say, is history. Steve Jobs announced the first iPod on October 23, 2011 and the company started shipping November that year. Today, Apple is no longer just a computer company, having dropped the “Compter” from its corporate name. The iPod is perhaps one of the predecessors of the post-PC era where iPhones, iPads and other similar devices dominate. And Apple, meanwhile, is now the world’s biggest music retailer. What started out as a risky gamble has turned into one of the technology industry’s success stories.