
Jon Rubinstein on the development of the iPod [video] - Austin_Conlon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47bNpIbCaL8&t=1214
======
TimSchumann
I've been reading/watching a lot about Apple history lately. The two or three
threads by Chris MacAskill on Cake that have been linked here recently, some
audiobooks, podcasts and the documentary 'General Magic'.

It's interesting how much of these personal accounts directly contradict each
other. I don't think much, if any, of the contradictions are in bad faith...
just an interesting window into the collective human ability to tell stories
to suit our perceptions after the fact.

~~~
warpdrive
May be Steve Jobs is the guy took inputs from multiple people and made the
final call and developed products which made everyone who gave inputs think
that the product is because of their idea.

~~~
handedness
By all accounts that's what happened. And the best part is, Steve also thought
everyone else's good ideas were his own.

A system that worked very well in that situation, but one that would be very
difficult to replicate.

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leovander
I loved the back and forth when Jon Rubinstein was at Palm, when every other
update for the Palm Pre would have the phone identify as an iPod in iTunes.

[https://www.wired.com/2009/10/palm-pre-
itunes/](https://www.wired.com/2009/10/palm-pre-itunes/)

~~~
Anechoic
What made this so ridiculous was that iTunes had a supported method to
interface with other devices that worked well (it's the reason why I stuck
with my Nokia devices for so long before jumping into the iOS ecosystem with
the iPhone 5s). Palm just wanted their devices to be treated as an iPod for no
good reason that I could see.

------
benbenolson
Even today, the iPod hardware is excellent and long-lasting; if you ever need
a portable music player with a long battery life and that's great for hacking,
try getting a 5th-generation iPod Video and upgrading it. It's fantastic: in a
matter of weeks (shipping takes time), I made a 256GB iPod Video that could
play nearly any format (Ogg, FLAC, WAV, MP3, etc.) and that has an over-24h
(I've not been able to run its battery down yet) battery life.

Its main advantage, though, is its ease of repair and upgradeability: an
amateur with a plastic pry tool and a screwdriver can do nearly anything in a
matter of minutes: replace the battery, replace the LCD (which are extremely
cheap), upgrade or replace its storage, replace the headphone jack, etc.

~~~
enjoy-your-stay
That's good to know, 'cos my poor old iPod nano (circa 2007 I think) that I
love definitely is in need of a new battery.

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kirykl
This interview is about way more interesting stuff than just iPod

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joe_bleau
[no time for video, so if these are answered let me know...]

Two things I never got about the iPod:

Why not add a second headphone jack so two people could listen and share the
experience?

Why didn't Apple preload some music (maybe classical stuff in the public
domain, performed by affordable Eastern European orchestras) for a better out
of the box experience? Think about kids getting an iPod at Christmas; until it
was sync'd to a computer, there wasn't much to do with it.

~~~
_hardwaregeek
Two headphone jacks is precisely the sort of feature that a developer would
find handy but might not make sense from a product view. For one, people will
immediately wonder, which jack should I use? Are they different in some way?
Or worse, if you put the jacks side by side, they might wonder if you need a
specific jack style, like airplanes.

It's also less pretty. More jacks is more ports is less sleek. I know, dumb,
but the whole point of the iPod was that it was a beautiful, intuitive MP3
player.

Preloaded music is also less sleek, less luxury. While Apple did eventually
start providing preloaded music, it was kinda controversial, and at least for
me, ended up just sitting on my iPhone taking up space. I also suspect the
lack of music might have been a forcing function to onboard you to iTunes as
soon as possible.

~~~
outside1234
Two jacks also would have made it bigger.

If anything, it would have made more sense to have a branch jack in the iPod
headphones.

------
Causality1
The key to the ipod's success was, in my opinion, the iTunes store and Apple's
excellent marketing. At no point in the ipod's history was it particularly
innovative with its hardware in comparison to competing devices but the
enormous amounts of work that went into forging an infrastructure-level
cultural presence paid dividends when it came to ipod sales. For over a decade
iTunes was _the_ place you bought music online, just as now YouTube is where
you watch user-created videos and Gmail is where you get a free email address.

~~~
friendlybus
Slashdot has a famous article edited by CmdrTaco declaring the iPod to be lame
for not comparing favourably in tech specs to other devices.

Jobs has always been big on timing and marketing. He was watching multitouch
since the 80s. Apple knew how to take developing tech and make it cool. Tech
specs and innovation have always been 1/4 of the deal.

~~~
lukifer
> famous article edited by CmdrTaco

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

(Nomads were pretty technically impressive at the time, but good luck fitting
one in your pocket, or finding the track you want in a collection of
thousands.)

~~~
huhtenberg

        darkpuma> cmdrtaco is wrongly maligned, the ipod would
                  not become massively successful until further
                  revisions were released.
    
        cmdrtaco> Thank you for setting the record straight!
    

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19447152](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19447152)

~~~
jdminhbg
They became massively successful without wireless, that's for sure.

