Jaromir Miko The father of the iPod, Tony Fadell, has not worked at Apple since 2008, and as he himself confirmed a few months ago, during that time a total of 18 devices from this family of products were born. Now, he shared more details from the iPod's history with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, who posted them on Twitter.
It could be interest you
Dan Pražák For him, Tony Fadell described that the idea to create a music player came about the same year it reached customers. Work on the project began already in the first week of 2001, when Fadell received the first phone call from Apple and two weeks later he met with the company's management. A week later, he became a consultant for the project then known as the P68 Dulcimer.
From this it might seem that the project has been in development for some time, but this was not true. There was no team working on the project, there were no prototypes, Jony Ivo's team wasn't working on the design for the device, and all Apple had at the time was a plan to create an MP3 player with a hard drive.
In March/March, the project was presented to Steve Jobs, who approved it at the end of the meeting. A month later, in the second half of April/April, Apple was already looking for the first manufacturer for the iPod, and only in May/May did Apple employ the first iPod developer.
The iPod was introduced on October 23, 2001 with the tagline 1 songs in your pocket. The main highlight of the device was a 1,8″ hard drive from Toshiba with a capacity of 5GB, which was small enough and at the same time bulky enough for its users to take most of their music library on the go. A few months later, Apple introduced a more expensive model with a 10GB capacity and VCard support for displaying business cards synchronized from a Mac.
I asked Tony Fadell about the iPod timeline for my fast project page. Summary: ?. pic.twitter.com/mf0CfbAEtB
— Patrick Collison (@patrickc) January 12, 2020
