Jon Rubinstein on the development of the iPod [video] | Hacker News Reader

Jon Rubinstein on the development of the iPod [video]

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69 pointsAustin_Conlon56 comments

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

This interview is about way more interesting stuff than just iPod

[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.

That's what the kids want: classical stuff in the public domain.

A headphone jack splitter only costs a few dollars.

And lowers the volume significantly. Especially on high impedance headphones.

Isn't that just an inherent issue with resistance? I'm not super familiar with headphone internals so maybe I'm missing something.

iPods don't have multiple headphone Jacks because the headphone cables aren't long enough for Social Distancing! DUH!

The iPod wasn't that type of device. It was an addition to iTunes. It did have a folder structure but the music files were 4 letter codes. As soon as iTunes associated a new iPod it wiped the hard drive and loaded it's own configurations and files.

iTunes on the otherhand, early on, did come with a small music selection. This would be OS9 era bands and musicians who were just famous enough to be featured but not famous enough to cost a fortune in licensing music. Also you could sign up for a monthly newsletter where Apple sent you a code to download featured artists.

Also, after years of service I cracked open my 2nd gen iPod. It was dense, there was not a spot available to add another headphone jack. Every cubic mm was occupied with battery, HD, control board, and display.

And when Apple started automatically adding U2 to everyone's library, it wasn't wanted.

Yeah, I think Steve was a little bit too enthusiastic about U2. He liked it, he figured everyone else would like it too.

I clicked on whatever affordance I had to click that allowed that album to be installed, and I enjoyed the music. I felt like a weirdo for not being annoyed and wondered what I had randomly configured that made the album's presence optional for me.

It seems like everyone else's experience was that the album took up precious space and was not removable.

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

Probably because of the Steve/Ive design philosophy.

Also interestingly iOS does supports audio sharing with Airpods.

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.

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.

The first Walkman had two headphone jacks:

http://www.walkman-archive.com/gadgets/walkman_sony_01_tps-l...

And this feature:

> the TPS-L2 had a "hotline" button which activated a small built-in microphone, partially overriding the sound from the cassette, and allowing one user to talk to the other over the music

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman_effect

> Sony Chairman Akio Morita added these features to the design for fear the technology would be isolating. Though he "thought it would be considered rude for one person to be listening to his music in isolation"), people bought their own units rather than share and these features were removed for later models.

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.

I can’t remember any portable MP3 playing device before iPod that wasn’t a joke. Are you thinking of a particular product that was comparable? I’m curious.

Define "a joke". There were quite a few flash-based players that predate the ipod and a couple of hard drive based ones. Heck, Rio was three generations into their mp3 players when the ipod was released.

Apple fixed the experience for non-nerd. Instead of having to go online and find music files yourself you could just go buy them.

I was constantly shopping around for MP3 players, they were too expensive with too little space, or not great reliability. The issue is that for a young person, such as myself, this was a big investment. The best thing to do before the iPod was really an mp3 cd player, because you could have many of these CDs.

If all we're working with anecdata, I honestly don't know anyone who didn't have an mp3 collection before the iTunes store.

The Rio had slow transfer speed (USB), hardly any storage (less than one CD), big ugly form factor... and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t rechargeable. My buddy at the time bought one. It did not impress.

The tech for the first iPod (Firewire and a 5GB hdd) made it essentially a different category of device.

I worked all summer building websites to buy the first gen Rio PMP300.

Everything about it sucked ass, including transferring songs over serial.

I had the Rio 600 before the iPod (https://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/rio600/) . It was definitely a joke, 32MB could barely fit a single CD and that was only after degrading the bitrate of the rip to a degree that it was really scratchy.

As a counterpoint, I had an MP3 discman from Rio [0], and the thing was magic. Each disc could hold 10-15 full albums, and I also made shuffle playlist CDs of 180ish tracks each. While it's obviously not pocketable, it was great for car audio, I stuck with it for a long while into the iPod era, since it had functionally infinite storage.

[0] https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/D1afoHzHkMS...

MP3 CD players like that don’t/didn’t get enough love. So much capacity for next to no cost and the units I had were robust to disc abuse which surprised me.

Yeah, I was always impressed at how resilient those cheap MP3 CD-Rs were in practice. And compared to old-school DiscMans with "20 second skip protection", it was very cool that it could just buffer the entire track in memory, make bumpy roads a non-issue. IIRC it was smart enough to do that well before the track began, so it instantly started playing when you skipped forward.

> At no point in the ipod's history was it particularly innovative with its hardware in comparison to competing devices

When the iPod came out I remember the main competitor was the Creative Nomad Jukebox. It was bulky (it was the around the same size as a Sony discman), the screen was small, and it had like 11 weirdly shaped buttons, and I think had recharable AA batteries (that took like 12 hours to charge). It was awesome to have all those songs on there, but the thing was a chore to use.

The original iPod was Mac only but it was delightful to use, it fit in your pocket, had an innovative scrolling mechanic, and charged through the same wire as it used for data.

Of course marketing and harmony with iTunes helped a ton, but pound for pound the iPod was simply a better product even without those crutches.

Having FireWire onboard allowing you to transfer songs in seconds instead of minutes was no less a gamechanger than anything else. The Nomad Jukebox was USB 1.1 and filling up a 6GB hard drive took hours.

This. I had both iPod and Nomad Jukebox. Firewire made it possible to update or completely replace the song selection in minutes rather than hours.

I have an ASUS laptop with FireWire, it was able to copy to an iPod quickly too.

No: the iPod's success was in playing the vast library of pirated music everybody had collected on their desktop PC for years thanks to Napster, Kazaa, etc. Remember the fad of "burning" CDs? That was not based on "infrastructure-level cultural presence", but rampant music piracy in the 90s.

This doesn't really explain why the iPod specifically was successful, as opposed to the numerous other MP3 players offered by other manufacturers like Creative, Sandisk, iRiver, Cowon, etc.

The iTunes store might have been important, but at least to me, the user interface was the amazing part. I remember when I got my first iPod. I already had a shitty mp3 player and a ton of illegally downloaded music, so I didn't need to use the iTunes store. I remember being amazed at how intuitive it was to choose an album to play, or an artist. So easy.

The click/touch wheel with acceleration was a huge deal for being able to browse through large music libraries quickly. The up/down button on other players was terrible in comparison.

I don't agree with people down-rating a post they disagree with. However, I have to disagree. The iPod was simply the best hardware to play the most songs. I've used many cd players and MP3 cd players, and the HD iPod was the best interface with a scrool wheel, and the best deal on capacity.

Of course, you could say the iTunes way of structuring metadata was essential for the UI, and I would agree. However, I hated the iTunes software on the desktop, and I've always ran alternative clients, and I know many others who did as well. When alternative iPod software came up that had directory support, that was great too.

After the iPod became popular, no other company was able to come up with the alternative, equally capable storage/price hardware. It took years for Sony/Creative to come up with good alternatives, and then iPhone took over.

I had been using quite a few MP3 players before the iPod but the iPod was the first device that brought together high capacity with very good usability. A very similar thing happened with the iPhone. There were smart cellphones with all the features before but the iPhone was the first to combine everything into an elegant package. I think that always was the real strength of Apple starting from the Apple II: wrapping everything together into a really nice package.

I've only ever paid my own money for one Apple product, and it was an iPod. Back when they came out they weren't as great as they later became, but the hard-drive was a significant advantage.

Back before I had an iPod I had something with flash-memory, holding a couple of hours of music at the most. Having a drive meant I had days worth of music in my pocket, more than I needed for a train/gym session, but a significant upgrade for sure.

iTunes music store was launched in 2003, two years after the first iPod. By that time the iPod was already a success, if not the mega hit it became later.

iTunes’ proposition at the time was Rip Mix Burn, making it the repository for the music all from your existing CDs. Myself and most people I knew had big MP3 collections long before we got players.

That is giving too little credit to hardware engineering team. The latter iPod were the first to adopt NAND based storage, to the point where half of the world's NAND production were going to Apple.

Not to mention its design, they were possibly the only MP3 player that looks good.

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.

“Jobs has always been big on timing and marketing.“

Totally agree. He was really good at seeing when all necessary ingredients for a great product were close to being available.

> 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.)

    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

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

I think another bit of context that is often missed with this quote is that there was substantial rumor-mongering about what Apple was doing, and a lot of people were expecting something a little more obviously revolutionary or at least further-along-the-tech-curve than a design-optimized MP3 player.

The key was the Windows port of iTunes.

All the online stores and rip/mix/burning didn't mean a thing if you could only cover 3% of the personal computer users out there back in the year 2000.

And, remember, Jobs didn't want to do it.

"We argued with Steve a bunch [about putting iTunes on Windows], and he said no. Finally, Phil Schiller and I said ‘we’re going to do it.’ And Steve said, ‘Fuck you guys, do whatever you want. You’re responsible.’ And he stormed out of the room."

https://qz.com/136239/making-itunes-available-for-windows-ch...

A trillion dollar insubordination. Nothing after iPod would have happened if not for this.

As much as Jobs didn't like Microsoft and Windows, he must've realized that without a Windows client iTunes would neithter have enough mass nor appeal for the music publishers. So in the end he got what he wanted - iTunes on Windows without him saying OK to this blasphemy. Had a cake and ate it too.

If you listen to the Rubinstein interview, the iPod and iTunes were part of a group of peripherals designed to bring users into the Macintosh ecosystem, not let them out.

Right, and then he realized that it was better to bring users into the Apple ecosystem rather than just the Mac one.

The hardware was quite innovative: for example it had the tiny Toshiba spinning hard disk (and some anti-skip cache) so had a comparatively unbelievable amount of storage that fit in your pocket.

On the software side the integration with the iTunes app made it easy to use which was definitely not the case with the other devices. They were electronics gadgets -- OK to use if you read the manual and were comfortable with the mechanations of getting tunes into them. The iPod was a music listening device.

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