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Inventing the iPod: How 'really big risks' paid off for Apple - CNET
Oct 24, 2021 2 mins, 49 secs
For the 20th anniversary of the iPod, we talk with the inventor of Apple's iconic music player, Tony Fadell, who reminisces about working with Steve Jobs and the success of the device.

"I was like, 'whoa whoa,'" Fadell tells me during a Zoom interview to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the iPod on Oct.

In early 2001 while he was developing his own MP3 player, Fadell was tapped as a consultant by Apple, who asked him to come up with different prototypes for a digital music player that would work with the company's just announced iTunes software.

"We're building this, and you're now going to join us to build it," Fadell recalled Jobs saying. .

It also revolutionized the digital music business, effectively destroying CDs and turning Apple's iconic white MP3 players, and their ubiquitous white headphones, into a status symbol.

When Apple executive Jon Rubinstein, who had been tasked with creating a music player, came knocking in early 2001, Fadell was already working on his own startup, Fuse Systems, with the goal of creating a mainstream MP3 player.

He spent roughly seven weeks researching different options for a digital music player, pulling research from his own company.

Apple veteran Stan Ng had worked with Fadell to prepare a stack of papers for the presentation — this was before the days of slideshows — and prepared him for both Jobs and his reputation for an explosive temper.

"Here's what I want to do," Fadell recalled Jobs saying, hijacking the conversation and forcing them to dive right in. .

"Steve picked it up and he's like, 'we're building this and you're now going to join us to build it,' and I was like 'whoa whoa,'" Fadell said. .

After a few weeks of negotiations with Jobs, Fadell joined Apple in April 2001 and assembled a team made up of Fuse and General Magic employees to put together what would become the iPod.

That original iPod gave birth to more than a dozen successors. .

When Jobs unveiled the iPod at an Oct.

And even though sales of the original iPod and the follow-up version didn't light any fires, Jobs followed through. 

Fadell said he and Jobs continually pushed each other to take each version further, and he noted that Apple had become the largest consumer of NAND flash memory when the iPod Nano came out. 

The iPod also got another boost in April 2003, when Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, giving people a way to buy music from a catalog of 200,000 digital songs rather than having to rip their own CDs. 

There had been other digital music players before, but the iPod changed everything

Along the way, Apple showed off its marketing prowess and created iconic ads  (remember the iPod silhouette commercials?) to pitch the music and its player

By 2007, a little more than five years after that original launch, Apple sold its 100 millionth iPod

By 2005, Fadell said Apple was already looking at the competitive threat of cellphones, which started packing in music players and cameras

Apple still sells an iPod — a $199 iPod Touch that looks more like an iPhone than that original music player — which stands as a testament to its longevity. 

Fadell, who had a hand in both the iPod Touch and the first three generations of the iPhone, left Apple in 2008, and in 2010 started Nest, which four years later he sold to Google for $3.2 billion

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