
iPod Product Timeline - coloneltcb
https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1216477318434050048
======
mortenjorck
Amazing to think that the original iPod could have gone from pitch to shipping
in under a year. Today, the next iPhone is almost certainly in the late stages
of engineering validation in January – and while there are many differences
between the iPod and the iPhone, the biggest is definitely scale.

Apple shipped 125,000 iPods in 2001. Today, they ship that many iPhones _every
six hours,_ or about 200 million per year.
([https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-
ipho...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-iphone-sales-
since-3rd-quarter-2007/))

------
peterburkimsher
I miss the 6-month iPod release cycle: every September there would be a new
full size iPod, and every February there'd be a new Mini or Nano.

Is there anyone else from the old iPodLinux community here? I was actively
moderating the forums in 2005, and fixing countless iPods for friends at
school/church. These days it seems like everybody's moved to Rockbox. I'm
still using a 5.5G with a Kingspec SSD, and lots more gadgets fitted into the
space where the HDD used to be.

My favourite story from the iPodLinux days was cracking the 4G firmware.
leachbj could only make the piezo work, but nilss then used that to dump the
binary by making click noises in a soundproof box, and successfully reverse-
engineered the rest of the firmware from that.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140810083116/http://www.newsci...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140810083116/http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7085#.XhuoMuIzb6c)

~~~
solstice
That's an amazing story!

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fortran77
They did some acquisitions, too. Like "Pixo" for the OS software

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixo)

So you sort of need to include Pixo's timeline to get the real picture of the
start-to-end-time

------
MontyCarloHall
Seems like a huge omission to jump from

>May (2nd week) Hired the first employee on the team

immediately to

>Oct (4th week) Launched iPod to the world

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akubera
The "fast project page" this links to is pretty interesting:
[https://patrickcollison.com/fast](https://patrickcollison.com/fast)

> The Empire State Building. Construction was started and finished in 410
> days.

> Unix. Ken Thompson wrote the first version in three weeks.

> Git. Linus Torvalds started working on Git on April 3 2005. It was self-
> hosting 4 days later.

Inspiring.

~~~
MontyCarloHall
But also sobering:

>San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. Its opening was
recently delayed to 2021, yielding a project duration of around 7,300 days.
“The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the
project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation
Agency spokesperson. The project will cost $310 million, i.e. $100,000 per
meter. The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra,
cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.

~~~
_tulpa
> The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost
> $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.

'the "highway" was not usable by general vehicles until 1943. Even then there
were many steep grades, a poor surface, switchbacks to gain and descend hills
...'
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Highway#Construction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Highway#Construction))
plus bridges which were temporary, impassable sections in 1943 when stuff
started to melt, etc, etc ,etc.

A war-time dirt-road constructed by the army and only traversable by stuff
that could probably go off-road anyway is not really the same as building
something in an existing city which has to support regular bus traffic.

------
dsego
I don't understand the comments about it being a revolutionary product. Do
americans really not know about all the other cheap mp3 players that came
before the ipod?

~~~
nell
The answer is a question: Do you know of a successful mp3 product that came
after iPod and took its market?

~~~
ianai
Aka an iPhone though they don’t really play flat files the same way. Only kind
of a bummer in hindsight with nearly omnipresent data.

