room in April 2001, where Jobs decided on the fundamentals of the iPod. There to hear Fadell present his proposals to Jobs were Rubinstein, Schiller, Ive, Jeff Robbin, and marketing director Stan Ng. Fadell didn’t know Jobs, and he was understandably intimidated. “When he walked into the conference room, I sat up and thought, ‘Whoa, there’s Steve!’ I was really on guard, because I’d heard how brutal he could be.”
The meeting started with a presentation of the potential market and what other companies were doing. Jobs, as usual, had no patience. “He won’t pay attention to a slide deck for more than a minute,” Fadell said. When a slide showed other possible players in the market, he waved it away. “Don’t worry about Sony,” he said. “We know what we’re doing, and they don’t.” After that, they quit showing slides, and instead Jobs peppered the group with questions. Fadell took away a lesson: “Steve prefers to be in the moment, talking things through. He once told me, ‘If you need slides, it shows you don’t know what you’re talking about.’”
Instead Jobs liked to be shown physical objects that he could feel, inspect, and fondle. So Fadell brought three different models to the conference room; Rubinstein had coached him on how to reveal them sequentially so that his preferred choice would be the piece de resistance. They hid the mockup of that option under a wooden bowl at the center of the table.
Fadell began his show-and-tell by taking the various parts they were using out of a box and spreading them on the table. There were the 1.8-inch drive, LCD screen, boards, and batteries, all labeled with their cost and weight. As he displayed them, they discussed how the prices or sizes might come down over the next year or so. Some of the pieces could be put together, like Lego blocks, to show the options.
Then Fadell began unveiling his models, which were made of Styrofoam with fishing leads inserted to give them the proper weight. The first had a slot for a removable memory card for music. Jobs dismissed it as complicated. The second had dynamic RAM memory, which was cheap but would lose all of the songs if the battery ran out. Jobs was not pleased. Next Fadell put a few of the pieces together to show what a device with the 1.8-inch hard drive would be like. Jobs seemed intrigued. The show climaxed with Fadell lifting the bowl and revealing a fully assembled model of that alternative. “I was hoping to be able to play more with the Lego parts, but Steve settled right on the hard-drive option just the way we had modeled it,” Fadell recalled. He was rather stunned by the process. “I was used to being at Philips, where decisions like this would take meeting after meeting, with a lot of PowerPoint presentations and going back for more study.”
Next it was Phil Schiller’s turn. “Can I bring out my idea now?” he asked. He left the room and returned with a handful of iPod models, all of which had the same device on the front: the soon-to-be-famous trackwheel. “I had been thinking of how you go through a playlist,” he recalled. “You can’t press a button hundreds of times. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a wheel?” By turning the wheel with your thumb, you could scroll through songs. The longer you kept turning, the faster the scrolling got, so you could zip through hundreds easily. Jobs shouted, “That’s it!” He got Fadell and the engineers working on it.
Once the project was launched, Jobs immersed himself in it daily. His main demand was “Simplify!” He would go over each screen of the user interface and apply a rigid test: If he wanted a song or a function, he should be able to get there in three clicks. And the click should be intuitive. If he couldn’t figure out how to navigate to something, or if it took more than three clicks, he would be brutal. “There would be times when we’d rack our brains on a user interface problem, and think we’d considered every option, and he would go, ‘Did you think of this?’” said Fadell. “And then we’d all go, ‘Holy shit.’ He’d redefine the problem or approach, and our little problem would go away.”
Every night Jobs would be on the phone with ideas. Fadell and the others would call each other up, discuss Jobs’s latest suggestion, and conspire on how to nudge him to where they wanted him to go, which worked about half the time. “We would have this swirling thing of Steve’s latest idea, and we would all try to stay ahead of it,” said Fadell. “Every day there was something like that, whether it was a switch here, or a button color, or a pricing strategy issue. With his style, you needed to work with your peers, watch each other’s back.”
One key insight Jobs had was that as many functions as possible should be performed using iTunes on your computer rather than on the iPod. As he later recalled:
In order to make the iPod really easy to use—and this took a lot of arguing on my part—we needed to limit what the device itself would do. Instead we put that functionality in iTunes on the computer. For example, we made it so you couldn’t make playlists using the device. You made playlists on iTunes, and then you synced with the device. That was controversial. But what made the Rio and other devices so brain-dead was that they were complicated. They had to do things like make playlists, because they weren’t integrated with the jukebox software on your computer. So by owning the iTunes software and the iPod device, that allowed us to make the computer and the device work together, and it allowed us to put the complexity in the right place.
The most Zen of all simplicities was Jobs’s decree, which astonished his colleagues, that the iPod would not have an on-off switch. It became true of most Apple devices. There was no need for one. Apple’s devices would go dormant if they were not being used, and they would wake up when you touched any key. But there was no need for a switch that would go “Click—you’re off. Good-bye.”
Suddenly everything had fallen into place: a drive that would hold a thousand songs; an interface and scroll wheel that would let you navigate a thousand songs; a FireWire connection that could sync a thousand songs in under ten minutes; and a battery that would last through a thousand songs. “We suddenly were looking at one another and saying, ‘This is going to be so cool,’” Jobs recalled. “We knew how cool it was, because we knew how badly we each wanted one personally. And the concept became so beautifully simple: a thousand songs in your pocket.” One of the copywriters suggested they call it a “Pod.” Jobs was the one who, borrowing from the iMac and iTunes names, modified that to iPod.
Jony Ive had been playing with the foam model of the iPod and trying to conceive what the finished product should look like when an idea occurred to him on a morning drive from his San Francisco home to Cupertino. Its face should be pure white, he told his colleague in the car, and it should connect seamlessly to a polished stainless steel back. “Most small consumer products have this disposable feel to them,” said Ive. “There is no cultural gravity to them. The thing I’m proudest of about the iPod is that there is something about it that makes it feel significant, not disposable.”
The white would be not just white, but
There was something very significant and nondisposable about it, yet there was also something very quiet and very restrained. It wasn’t wagging its tail in your face. It was restrained, but it was also crazy, with those flowing headphones. That’s why I like white. White isn’t just a neutral color. It is so pure and quiet. Bold and conspicuous and yet so inconspicuous as well.
Lee Clow’s advertising team at TBWAChiatDay wanted to celebrate the iconic nature of the iPod and its whiteness rather than create more traditional product-introduction ads that showed off the device’s features. James Vincent, a lanky young Brit who had played in a band and worked as a DJ, had recently joined the agency, and he was a natural to help focus Apple’s advertising on hip millennial-generation music lovers rather than rebel baby boomers. With the help of the art director Susan Alinsangan, they created a series of billboards and posters for the iPod, and they spread the options on Jobs’s conference room table for his inspection.
At the far right end they placed the most traditional options, which featured straightforward photos of the iPod on a white background. At the far left end they placed the most graphic and iconic treatments, which showed just a silhouette of someone dancing while listening to an iPod, its white earphone wires waving with the music. “It understood your emotional and intensely personal relationship with the music,” Vincent said. He suggested to Duncan Milner, the creative director, that they all stand firmly at the far left end, to see if they could get Jobs to gravitate there. When he walked in, he went immediately to the right, looking at the stark product pictures. “This looks great,” he said. “Let’s talk about these.” Vincent, Milner, and Clow did not budge from the other end. Finally, Jobs looked up, glanced at the iconic treatments, and said, “Oh, I guess you like this stuff.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t show the product. It doesn’t say what it is.” Vincent proposed that they use the iconic images but add the tagline, “1,000 songs in your pocket.” That would say it all. Jobs glanced back toward the right end of the table, then finally agreed. Not surprisingly he was soon claiming that it was his idea to push for the more iconic ads.
