00.05
When the late Steve Jobs was handed the iPod prototype, he told his engineers it was too big. They said it was as small as it could be, that there was all kinds of technology to fit in that couldn’t be shrunk.
Apple’s chief executive paused and then, so the story goes, dropped the iPod in a fishtank. He pointed to the bubbles coming from the gadget and told the engineers that if there was air in it there was space in it. “Make it smaller,” he ordered.
The story is apocryphal but believable, given Jobs’s perfectionism. When Apple finally launched the iPod, 10 years ago this week, it changed how we listen to music, revolutionising the music industry and transforming Apple.
Let the music play and play: Steve Jobs and the first generation of the iPod
Apple decided to build a music player in early 2001, and Steve Jobs asked Jon Rubinstein, head of hardware engineering, to look into it. In January that year Apple introduced iTunes, its music program for Macs. A month later, Rubinstein was shown a 1.8-inch hard drive during a visit to Toshiba in Japan.
“They said they didn’t know what to do with it. Maybe put it in a small notebook,” Rubinstein said later. “I went back to Steve and I said, 'I know how to do this.’ He said, 'Go for it.’”
The only drawback was time: Jobs wanted the iPod to be available that Christmas. A team of 30 began working long hours on Project P-68. Jonathan Ive, the British-born designer who has worked at Apple since 1992, said: “Like everyone else, I knocked myself out, not so much because it was a challenge – which it was – but because I wanted to have one.”
Ive oversaw every detail, but input came from across the team: the idea for the scroll-wheel control system came from Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing; the name came from Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter, who said the player reminded him of the escape pods on the spaceship in the film 2001. Underpinning it all were Jobs’s demands for simplicity and elegance. He stressed how important it was that any song could be reached in three clicks or fewer. “If ever there was a product that catalysed Apple’s reason for being, it’s this,” Jobs said after the iPod was released.
But the reaction was not wholly positive. At $399, it was too expensive, said critics; others thought the iPod lacked substance. At first, it worked only with Apple’s Mac computers, though in 2002, a Windows-compatible iPod was released. A year later came the iTunes Music Store and a Windows version of iTunes.
“That’s when it all started coming together. Sales of the iPod went through the roof,” says Feargal Sharkey, chief executive of UK Music, the body that represents the British music industry. Apple sold its millionth iPod in June 2003 and the two millionth six months later. At the end of 2004, it had sold 10 million.
By the middle of the decade, the white iPod earbuds were everywhere (ironically, they were the weakest feature). Apple’s adverts were everywhere, too – dancing silhouettes against bright backgrounds, clasping their iPods – and the message was clear: your music with you, all the time.
As sales grew, so did the iPod range: an iPod Mini, a screen-free Shuffle and the iPod Touch. To date, more than 300 million iPods have been bought.
Sales have started to fall, though, as more people carry their music on smartphones, which is why the iPod Touch is not just a music player but a games machine, web browser and communications device. Meanwhile, Apple, Google and Amazon have launched services that let you store music on internet “cloud” servers to be downloaded to whatever device you have. The iPod’s significance has waned but we haven’t lost that desire to carry our music with us.
“Ten years on, the most important thing is that it still has all my favourite tunes on it,” says Sharkey.
“They said they didn’t know what to do with it. Maybe put it in a small notebook,” Rubinstein said later. “I went back to Steve and I said, 'I know how to do this.’ He said, 'Go for it.’”
The only drawback was time: Jobs wanted the iPod to be available that Christmas. A team of 30 began working long hours on Project P-68. Jonathan Ive, the British-born designer who has worked at Apple since 1992, said: “Like everyone else, I knocked myself out, not so much because it was a challenge – which it was – but because I wanted to have one.”
Ive oversaw every detail, but input came from across the team: the idea for the scroll-wheel control system came from Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing; the name came from Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter, who said the player reminded him of the escape pods on the spaceship in the film 2001. Underpinning it all were Jobs’s demands for simplicity and elegance. He stressed how important it was that any song could be reached in three clicks or fewer. “If ever there was a product that catalysed Apple’s reason for being, it’s this,” Jobs said after the iPod was released.
But the reaction was not wholly positive. At $399, it was too expensive, said critics; others thought the iPod lacked substance. At first, it worked only with Apple’s Mac computers, though in 2002, a Windows-compatible iPod was released. A year later came the iTunes Music Store and a Windows version of iTunes.
“That’s when it all started coming together. Sales of the iPod went through the roof,” says Feargal Sharkey, chief executive of UK Music, the body that represents the British music industry. Apple sold its millionth iPod in June 2003 and the two millionth six months later. At the end of 2004, it had sold 10 million.
By the middle of the decade, the white iPod earbuds were everywhere (ironically, they were the weakest feature). Apple’s adverts were everywhere, too – dancing silhouettes against bright backgrounds, clasping their iPods – and the message was clear: your music with you, all the time.
As sales grew, so did the iPod range: an iPod Mini, a screen-free Shuffle and the iPod Touch. To date, more than 300 million iPods have been bought.
Sales have started to fall, though, as more people carry their music on smartphones, which is why the iPod Touch is not just a music player but a games machine, web browser and communications device. Meanwhile, Apple, Google and Amazon have launched services that let you store music on internet “cloud” servers to be downloaded to whatever device you have. The iPod’s significance has waned but we haven’t lost that desire to carry our music with us.
“Ten years on, the most important thing is that it still has all my favourite tunes on it,” says Sharkey.
Posted in: ipod,Portable Audio
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar