Part 5 (1/2)

The first DMX meetings were between Vidich, Gage, Rad.u.c.h.el, and others at Warner Music's parent company, the newly formed AOL Time Warner. At this point, the internet bubble had already popped, and once-promising copyright-protection companies such as Liquid Audio and Reciprocal had their own problems and were in no position to bail out the recording industry. Warner's people didn't want to approach Microsoft, which owned the Windows Media audio format, because executives feared the predatory software giant would rope the major record companies into an unfavorable deal. So they picked a longtime partner, Sony Corp., which had had a huge role in creating the original CD. Vidich, Gage, and Rad.u.c.h.el flew all over the world to meet with Sony employees such as Koichi Tagawa-at the Peninsula Hotel near Warner Music in Beverly Hills, at Sony headquarters in Tokyo, and at Sony Music's US headquarters. One such meeting was w scheduled for September 11, 2001, in New York City, and after the attacks, sh.e.l.l-shocked j.a.panese reps realized they were stranded, with nothing better to do than talk about the future of digital music. Gage and Rad.u.c.h.el helped them hang on to their hotel rooms for extra nights, since there was absolutely no way for them to fly back to Tokyo that day.

The secret talks heated up. Vidich and Gage enlisted executives from other companies. Larry Kenswil, the digital-strategy expert at Universal Music, the world's biggest record label, agreed to join. Sony reps insisted on inviting Wally Heijnemans, a senior strategy executive from Philips, because Sony and Philips had a history of working together to create high-tech music products. Sony Music's Al Smith was on board, too. Finally, the Warner group approached James Higa, a vice president at Apple Computer who for years had served as chief executive officer Steve Jobs's number two. (Warner enlisted Apple after a recommendation from Sony, which had been working with the computer company on various projects at the time.) The talks went well, as Gage remembers. The group started to lean toward a new digital music format-Advanced Audio Coding, or AAC, a sort of update to MP3 developed by audio engineers including a team from Fraunhofer Inst.i.tute in Germany. Unlike MP3, this format made room for copy protection. In Kevin Gage's vision, copy-protected AAC files could have been supported in new digital music stores-and portable players-from AOL, Sony, and Apple. Everybody would have won.

But there was a snag. The reps from Sony Corp. opposed AAC. They preferred their own format, ATRAC3,* for which Sony would have received a CD-like royalty payment, of course. There were other problems, too. Apple's Jobs and Sony's n.o.buyuki Idei weren't getting along. They had discussed making Sony's television-focused hardware and Apple's new strategy of combining movies, pictures, music, and other entertainment on the same desktop more compatible. But apparently the technology moguls didn't come out of it as friends. ”You know Steve, he has his own agenda,” Idei later told ex for which Sony would have received a CD-like royalty payment, of course. There were other problems, too. Apple's Jobs and Sony's n.o.buyuki Idei weren't getting along. They had discussed making Sony's television-focused hardware and Apple's new strategy of combining movies, pictures, music, and other entertainment on the same desktop more compatible. But apparently the technology moguls didn't come out of it as friends. ”You know Steve, he has his own agenda,” Idei later told exRed Herring editor Tony Perkins in a website interview. ”Although he's a genius, he doesn't share everything with you. This is a difficult person to work with if you are a big company. We started working with them, but it is a nightmare.” The Sony-Apple politics trickled down to the DMX group. Al Smith of Sony Music was caught in the middle, wanting to contribute to a new digital music technology but not wanting to alienate his superiors at Sony Corp. The Warner reps who'd started the whole thing, Gage and Vidich, were just frustrated. ”There was a certain sense that we have done 99 percent of this work and gotten to this point-and Sony was in a favorable position to hold it up,” Gage says. Finally, in early 2002, the talks disintegrated. editor Tony Perkins in a website interview. ”Although he's a genius, he doesn't share everything with you. This is a difficult person to work with if you are a big company. We started working with them, but it is a nightmare.” The Sony-Apple politics trickled down to the DMX group. Al Smith of Sony Music was caught in the middle, wanting to contribute to a new digital music technology but not wanting to alienate his superiors at Sony Corp. The Warner reps who'd started the whole thing, Gage and Vidich, were just frustrated. ”There was a certain sense that we have done 99 percent of this work and gotten to this point-and Sony was in a favorable position to hold it up,” Gage says. Finally, in early 2002, the talks disintegrated.

A few months later, Vidich was in his office, on the thirtieth floor of 75 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, when he received a phone call. It was from his boss, Barry Schuler, then president of AOL. Schuler had been meeting off and on for months with a colleague-Steve Jobs of Apple Computer-sometimes over dinner at Schuler's house in northern Virginia. At first Schuler was trying to get Jobs to include an AOL platform on the Macintosh computer operating system, which didn't work out. But they started talking about digital music. Jobs showed Schuler a new portable music player Apple had put out called the iPod. At one point, Jobs called Schuler at his AOL Time Warner office, and Schuler pinged Vidich, asking him to join the call. Of course, Of course, Vidich said. Jobs rambled animatedly for a while. The Apple CEO told Vidich and Schuler the digital music services of the time, Pressplay and MusicNet, had gotten it all wrong. He wanted to talk about something new. Something digital music fans would find more interesting. Vidich listened carefully. Vidich said. Jobs rambled animatedly for a while. The Apple CEO told Vidich and Schuler the digital music services of the time, Pressplay and MusicNet, had gotten it all wrong. He wanted to talk about something new. Something digital music fans would find more interesting. Vidich listened carefully.

THE MYTHOLOGICAL AURA surrounding Steven Paul Jobs was bright enough to impress even veteran record label executives who were impervious to getting starstruck. His back story rivaled that of Madonna or Bruce Springsteen. Born in 1955, he was adopted as a baby by a South San Francisco couple, Clara and Paul Jobs. His father was a tinkerer who spent weekends fixing and reselling jalopies. He had been a Coast Guard engine room machinist, a handy background for his later work at International Harvester and, when Steve was at elementary school, Spectraphysics. To find work, Paul Jobs moved the family to Mountain View, a quiet town outside Palo Alto where a Hewlett-Packard engineer befriended young Steve and gave him a carbon microphone to play with. surrounding Steven Paul Jobs was bright enough to impress even veteran record label executives who were impervious to getting starstruck. His back story rivaled that of Madonna or Bruce Springsteen. Born in 1955, he was adopted as a baby by a South San Francisco couple, Clara and Paul Jobs. His father was a tinkerer who spent weekends fixing and reselling jalopies. He had been a Coast Guard engine room machinist, a handy background for his later work at International Harvester and, when Steve was at elementary school, Spectraphysics. To find work, Paul Jobs moved the family to Mountain View, a quiet town outside Palo Alto where a Hewlett-Packard engineer befriended young Steve and gave him a carbon microphone to play with.

Like his adopted father, Steve was a straight shooter who easily grasped mechanical concepts. Third grade bored him, so he s.h.i.+fted to other pursuits-dropping off live snakes into cla.s.srooms and blowing up small homemade bombs. One fourth-grade teacher, Imogene ”Teddy” Hill, saw immediately that Jobs was a gifted child and pushed him to skip fifth grade. But he didn't like his hardscrabble junior high, so he convinced his parents to move to Los Altos, heavy with electrical engineers from Lockheed and other companies specializing in electronics and miniaturization. Jobs attended junior high in nearby Cupertino, a place that would later have even more significance in his life, and met a fellow late-1960s geek named Bill Fernandez.

Jobs and Fernandez, an attorney's son, had no interest in sports, unlike the rest of their cla.s.smates. But they were obsessed with electronics, and spent endless hours building stuff in their own garages and the garages of friendly local engineers. One of these mentor types was Jerry Wozniak, who worked for Lockheed, and had a son, Stephen, who had spent his one year at the University of Colorado not achieving much by way of academics. Steve Wozniak had earned the wrong kind of attention from the dean of students after programming computers in the campus data center to spit out piles of paper declaring ”f.u.c.k NIXON.” ”The Woz” left CU and returned to Cupertino. Wozniak befriended Fernandez. Conveniently, Fernandez had a nice workbench in his garage.

Wozniak and Fernandez built what they called a ”Flair Pen or Cream Soda Computer,” on which lights flashed when users flipped switches. Fernandez invited Jobs over to see it, and he was impressed. No other kid in Cupertino knew more about electronics than he did, or so he thought until he met the Woz, who was five years older. They became friends immediately. Both were loners, and while they shared a pa.s.sion for electronics and computers, it became obvious that Wozniak was purely into the technology while Jobs had higher ambitions for himself. In the meantime, he was happy to meet the Woz's friend John ”Captain Crunch” Draper, who showed the misfit electronics prodigies how to ”phreak” AT&T telephone technology using something called a ”blue box” and make free long-distance calls whenever they wanted.

As Jobs grew older, he went with the times, smoking his share of pot and hallucinating the sounds of Bach in a wheat field during an LSD trip. He enrolled at Reed College in Portland-where James T. Russell, who filed the first patents for the technology leading to the CD, had received his physics degree almost twenty years earlier-and dropped out at age eighteen. It was 1974, and he was living with his parents when he spotted a cla.s.sified ad from Atari, makers of the hot new video game Pong Pong. By then a hippie, dressed in rags, Jobs got the job.*After a brief early hiatus from Atari to track down a baba in India, Jobs returned home and rediscovered his friends.h.i.+p with Wozniak, by then a Hewlett-Packard engineer in Silicon Valley. The Woz was addicted to an Atari driving game, Gran Track Gran Track, and showed up at Jobs's office to play all night on the company's production-room floor. In exchange, Wozniak gave Jobs free, valuable engineering advice. During this time, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell approached Jobs with an idea for a video game, and Wozniak ended up designing the cla.s.sic Break-Out Break-Out in forty-eight hours while Jobs fetched him candy and c.o.ke. Bushnell paid Jobs his fee of $1,000 for the game, but Jobs told Wozniak he'd received $600-and paid the Woz a lowball $300. in forty-eight hours while Jobs fetched him candy and c.o.ke. Bushnell paid Jobs his fee of $1,000 for the game, but Jobs told Wozniak he'd received $600-and paid the Woz a lowball $300.

In general, the Steves had very different interests. Jobs delved into Zen Buddhism, and Wozniak was attending meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, where he learned to build printed circuit boards that would ultimately drive color displays. He started bringing Jobs to the meetings, and soon they decided to form a company to sell circuit boards to hobbyists who wanted to build their own crude computers. It fell to Jobs to come up with the name, and he decided on Apple. It wasn't because of his favorite band, the Beatles, who owned a famous record label by the same name in London. It was because he had fond memories of working in an apple orchard as a teenager one summer in Oregon. Against his father's wishes-Jerry Wozniak was wary of his son forming a company with a partner who didn't actually invent products-Steve Wozniak agreed to sign a ten-page doc.u.ment forming Apple Computer on April 1, 1976. To generate a budget, Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus for $500, with the price marked down due to a poorly timed engine explosion, and Wozniak sold his HP calculator for $500. Apple's first customer was a new chain of computer stores, the Byte Shop, whose owner liked Wozniak's circuit boards so much he ordered fifty of them for $25,000. The hardware would soon morph into a bona fide computer, the Apple I. ”We didn't build the computer in a garage,” Wozniak later told Rolling Stone Rolling Stone. ”I built most of it in my apartment and in my office at Hewlett-Packard, where I was working at the time. We just used the garage to a.s.semble the parts toward the end. I don't know where the whole garage thing came from. Maybe it's because Bill Hewlett and David Packard built their machine in a garage, everyone a.s.sumed we built ours there, too. But really, very little work was done there.” By the end of that year, Apple I sales generated almost $100,000.

Next, the Woz designed the Apple II in his kitchen. Jobs kept hustling up customers, often making sales calls in bare feet and ratty jeans. They recruited employees. Atari's Rod Holt charged $200 a day, which the Steves claimed was no problem even though they had barely any money; Holt came up with a new power supply so Jobs could achieve his Zen Buddhist vision of eliminating the loud fan whirring inside every computer of the era. (Eventually Holt more than made up for his early lost salary, becoming an Apple engineer and taking a 10 percent stake in the company.) Wozniak was busily creating new products. Endowed with equal parts perfectionism and a sense of urgency, Jobs would get a vision in his head of a new product that he knew would excite the personal computer users. Then he would lean incredibly hard on his employees, including Wozniak, to design it quickly and exactly to his specifications. He wanted the casing for the Apple II to look like a popular, boxy dorm stereo called the KLH, for example, and forced his crew to work morning till night improving rejected prototype after rejected prototype. Jobs's relentlessness eventually took its toll on his friends.h.i.+p with Wozniak; within four years, the inventor would leave the company. But in 1977, Apple took more than three hundred orders for Apple IIs. Jobs started to tap into the power of his charisma. His big, slightly goofy nose gave him the look of the gentle electronics geek that was a big part of his personality, while his sharp eyebrows and fierce stare went with the unwavering confidence and bossy precision that sometimes drove his employees crazy.

”You'd work on something all night, he'd look at it in the morning and say, 'That sucks,'” said Steve Capps, a programmer who later quit Apple, then returned to work on the Macintosh team. ”He'd want you to defend it. And if you could, then you were doing your job, and Steve respected you. If not, he'd blow you out of the water.”

In 1979, Apple Computer sold $7.2 million worth of stock. Jobs was a millionaire at twenty-four. He bought a house in Los Gatos. He combed his hair and occasionally wore suits. In 1980, the week John Lennon was murdered, Apple went public, selling 4.6 million shares in less than an hour, the most successful public offering to date. Jobs was worth $217.5 million. He landed on the cover of Time Time in 1983. A year later, he paid the advertising firm ChiatDay $1.5 million to create one of the most famous television commercials of all time-”1984,” in which a runner destroys a video screen of Big Brother, freeing bald drones in s.p.a.ce suits. It ran exactly once, during the Super Bowl, introducing the Macintosh on January 24, 1984. This new personal computer would revolutionize Jobs's industry, but it was a few years ahead of its time. It caught on with artists, designers, and college students, but it led to Jobs's biggest business failure. Mac sales fell far under projections by Christmas 1984. Apple's board voted Jobs out of the company. in 1983. A year later, he paid the advertising firm ChiatDay $1.5 million to create one of the most famous television commercials of all time-”1984,” in which a runner destroys a video screen of Big Brother, freeing bald drones in s.p.a.ce suits. It ran exactly once, during the Super Bowl, introducing the Macintosh on January 24, 1984. This new personal computer would revolutionize Jobs's industry, but it was a few years ahead of its time. It caught on with artists, designers, and college students, but it led to Jobs's biggest business failure. Mac sales fell far under projections by Christmas 1984. Apple's board voted Jobs out of the company.

For the next decade and a half, independently, Jobs and Apple suffered through extreme highs and lows. Thanks to a $20 million stake from future presidential candidate Ross Perot, Jobs's post-Apple startup, NeXT, put out a snazzy computer called the Cube. It was a bust, despite a few s.e.xy new ideas, like an efficient magnetic drive rather than an old-school floppy-disc drive, and a sleek, black-box shape. But Jobs recovered from this elaborate setback, aiming the glare of his considerable charisma toward the movie industry-he bought a special-effects company known as the Graphics Group from Star Wars Star Wars director George Lucas for $5 million, and dumped in $5 million of his own money. This was the beginning of Pixar, the computer-animation firm that would create director George Lucas for $5 million, and dumped in $5 million of his own money. This was the beginning of Pixar, the computer-animation firm that would create Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and and Cars Cars and wind up with seven Academy Awards. Meanwhile, Microsoft, which over Jobs's protestations had designed the Windows operating system along the same lines as the Macintosh operating system, eclipsed Apple as the world's largest software company by the early 1990s. In turning his company into a monster, just in time for the internet, Bill Gates left Apple behind. ”Apple stopped creating,” Jobs told and wind up with seven Academy Awards. Meanwhile, Microsoft, which over Jobs's protestations had designed the Windows operating system along the same lines as the Macintosh operating system, eclipsed Apple as the world's largest software company by the early 1990s. In turning his company into a monster, just in time for the internet, Bill Gates left Apple behind. ”Apple stopped creating,” Jobs told Rolling Stone Rolling Stone. In the fourth quarter of 1995, Apple lost $68 million and laid off 1,300 employees.

Soon a new Apple CEO, Gil Amelio, started nursing the company back to health, taking tax writeoffs for the unsold inventory, securing key loans, and hiring Jobs as a ”special adviser.” It wasn't enough. Jobs rode back into Apple's Cupertino headquarters as Amelio's replacement in summer 1997. At first he was Interim CEO and made a big deal to the press about his strikingly low salary-$1 a year. He cut costs. He made rules banning outlandish travel expenses. He hired hotshots like NeXT's Jonathan Rubinstein, who took over the hardware division. He was determined to turn Apple around and became irritably focused on the task, barking at employees he encountered in hallways. By the end of Jobs's first year back-in part thanks to Amelio's earlier work-Apple was profitable again.

Apple would slowly crawl back to its 1980s heights with candy-colored iMacs and their portable iBook cousins. But it took one more ahead-of-its-time vision to make Jobs and Apple more successful and famous than ever. The plan, of course, involved digital music.

THE FIRST PORTABLE digital music player was the MP3Man, created by a South Korean company, Saehan, which was so tiny it never really registered on the Recording Industry a.s.sociation of America's radar. Not so the Rio PMP300, a black, rectangular device resembling a walkie-talkie that had shrunk in the dryer. Manufactured by the Chats-worth, California, electronics company Diamond Multimedia, the Rio made its debut in September 1998, promising MP3 fans they could transfer twenty-four songs from their computer to the device and listen through twelve hours of battery power. It was ugly and hard to use. ”We were a small company,” says David Watkins, then president of Diamond's RioPort division. ”We didn't have the funding to build the business the way we wanted to.” digital music player was the MP3Man, created by a South Korean company, Saehan, which was so tiny it never really registered on the Recording Industry a.s.sociation of America's radar. Not so the Rio PMP300, a black, rectangular device resembling a walkie-talkie that had shrunk in the dryer. Manufactured by the Chats-worth, California, electronics company Diamond Multimedia, the Rio made its debut in September 1998, promising MP3 fans they could transfer twenty-four songs from their computer to the device and listen through twelve hours of battery power. It was ugly and hard to use. ”We were a small company,” says David Watkins, then president of Diamond's RioPort division. ”We didn't have the funding to build the business the way we wanted to.”

Shortly after the Rio PMP300 came out, the RIAA sued Diamond Multimedia, saying the portable player violated the Audio Home Recording Act-which the record industry had lobbied Congress to pa.s.s in 1992. But Rio had excellent attorneys. They studied the act and found a gaping loophole. The act required electronics companies-like Sony, for the Digital Audio Tape player-to pay a royalty to record labels every time it made devices that would allow more than one copy of a recording. But it specifically exempted computers. And the only way to transfer an MP3 to a Rio was to rip it onto a computer hard drive.* In October 1999, a US District Court judge denied the RIAA's request for a temporary injunction against the Rio. ”They were just shocked when they lost,” Watkins says. ”They had never lost a case before.” Diamond sold 200,000 copies of the Rio PMP300 after that. In October 1999, a US District Court judge denied the RIAA's request for a temporary injunction against the Rio. ”They were just shocked when they lost,” Watkins says. ”They had never lost a case before.” Diamond sold 200,000 copies of the Rio PMP300 after that.

Meanwhile, over at rapidly recovering Apple Computer, Steve Jobs's latest idea was the ”Digital Hub Strategy”-”where the Mac was the center of your lifestyle,” as the company's hardware chief, Jonathan Rubinstein, recalls. Digital Hub integrated a number of hip, entertainment-oriented ideas, like iMovie and iPhoto; one blatantly obvious missing piece was the lack of digital music. Apple's brain trust-Jobs, Rubinstein, marketing gurus Phil Schiller and Stan Ng-began discussing how to fill this void.

It was serendipitous for ex-Apple engineer Bill Kincaid, who was working with a start-up company on new audio software called SoundJam, that he heard a very interesting National Public Radio report as he was driving to a track to do a few laps in his Formula Ford car. The report was about MP3s, which Kincaid had never heard of. It focused on Diamond's Rio player, and the bit that most intrigued Kincaid was its lack of compatibility with Apple's Macintosh system. Kincaid, who had worked for Apple on a Mac operating system in the early 1990s, called Diamond Multimedia the next day about designing hardware to interface between the Rio player and the Macintosh. He needed help with the software, so he contacted Jeff Robbin, one of the best programmers he knew, who had also worked at Apple in the early 1990s. Together they spent months inventing SoundJam, a digital jukebox that made it easy for consumers to organize the MP3s they'd ripped or downloaded to their hard drives and play music over their PC speakers. They started selling it through a small software publisher, Casady & Greene, in 1999. ”We got that to pretty much be the premiere MP3 player on the Mac,” says Robin Casady, the company's co-owner. ”And when Apple started looking around for one, they chose ours, and we sold it to them.”

At Apple, SoundJam morphed into iTunes, which had a sleek geometric screen with a brushed-aluminum look and made organizing music files on a computer seem like the hippest thing in the world. Jobs talked it up in his January 2001 Macworld Conference & Expo keynote.

The next step in Apple's plan was to design a player. The brain trust studied the market. In addition to the PMP300, there was Creative Labs' irritatingly heavy Nomad Jukebox, which had utilized Fujitsu's 2.5-inch hard drive but still relied on a super-slow USB connection to s.h.i.+ft songs from the computer to the player. Overall, Apple's Rubinstein remembers, the players were ”just awful.” With Jobs's unique brand of encouragement ringing in his ears, Rubinstein put his hardware team to work. Through a contact, he found thirty-two-year-old engineer Tony Fadell, who was on a Vail ski-slope chairlift when he took the call. Rubinstein offered him a high-pressure, eight-week contract. Fadell was single. He had plenty of time to work his b.u.t.t off, Apple-style. By the time he made it to the top of the mountain, although Rubinstein refused to tell him what project he'd be working on, Fadell accepted.

First, Rubinstein and Fadell needed the tiniest hard drive ever made, something that would be affordable to reproduce thousands of times. At the time, nothing small enough to serve their purpose existed. ”I basically stalled for a while,” Rubinstein recalls. ”I told Steve, 'I can't do it yet. It's not time.'” Soon, Tos.h.i.+ba came up with a 1.8-inch, 5-gigabyte disc drive that could carry 1,000 songs and wasn't amazingly expensive. Jobs moved quickly to sign an exclusive deal with Tos.h.i.+ba-shutting out Creative Labs, which was on the brink of releasing its own new player, the Zen. ”We had a very s.e.xy player,” the company's founder and CEO, Sim Wong Hoo, told Business 2.0, Business 2.0, animatedly waving his arms in frustration, ”but we couldn't s.h.i.+p it.” Next, Apple's engineers had to find a much faster way than USB of transferring a digital song from a Mac to the player. The solution was FireWire, a technology Apple had invented in the early 1990s, although at the time it was mostly used with j.a.panese-built camcorders, not computers. ”Once I saw all those technologies, I went to Steve and said, 'Hey, we know how to do this now. We need some funding,'” Rubinstein recalls. ”I started hiring a team and we went and built the thing.” animatedly waving his arms in frustration, ”but we couldn't s.h.i.+p it.” Next, Apple's engineers had to find a much faster way than USB of transferring a digital song from a Mac to the player. The solution was FireWire, a technology Apple had invented in the early 1990s, although at the time it was mostly used with j.a.panese-built camcorders, not computers. ”Once I saw all those technologies, I went to Steve and said, 'Hey, we know how to do this now. We need some funding,'” Rubinstein recalls. ”I started hiring a team and we went and built the thing.”

The project was a secret. Other than Jobs, Rubinstein, Fadell, and a few other Apple executives, n.o.body even knew it involved music. The code name was P-68, or, more colloquially, ”Dulcimer,” which signified nothing more than ”an elegant stringed instrument.” Working day and night through the course of his contract, Fadell played with cardboard and foam, moving things around in various patterns to show himself what the player might look like. Eventually, he came up with a box the size of a pack of Marlboros with a cell-phone-sized screen at the top and push b.u.t.tons at the bottom. He weighed down the gadget with fis.h.i.+ng weights, to approximate what it might feel like. Then it was time to meet with Jobs. Fadell and Rubinstein knew Jobs liked to get prototypes in groups of three, so they sent up two as ”sacrificial lambs,” as Steven Levy puts it in his 2006 book The Perfect Thing The Perfect Thing. The third one, they hid under a wooden bowl in the conference room on the fourth floor of Apple's Cupertino offices. It turned out they knew Jobs pretty well. He quickly dismissed the first two, but the third one left him speechless.

At the same meeting, another Apple executive, marketing vice president Phil Schiller, showed his own innovation-the scroll wheel at the center, which would control the gadget in lieu of a keyboard. Jobs turned to Fadell. We can do it, We can do it, Fadell told him. Fadell told him.

Fadell sent feelers out to hardware and software companies about manufacturing the device's internal parts in an affordable way. His contacts were, to put it mildly, somewhat confused. ”These suppliers were like, 'Apple is calling, that's great.... What What are they doing, exactly?'” Fadell recalls. ”Then they're looking at me, going, 'You're a are they doing, exactly?'” Fadell recalls. ”Then they're looking at me, going, 'You're a contractor. contractor. Should I even take this seriously?' And: 'This seems totally foreign to [Apple's] business. Why would they buy this?' It was something non-computer-related.” Nonetheless, PortalPlayer, a small company, was thrilled to throw in its lot with Apple Computer, supplying the physical operating system and the external silicon casing. Rubinstein's team then hired Pixo, a software company founded by ex-Apple employee Paul Mercer, to write the programs for running the PortalPlayer chips. ”Apple wouldn't even show us what [the final device] looked like,” Mercer recalls. ”[The working model] had boards and a screen in the corner.” Jobs pushed his top lieutenants, who pushed the hardware and software teams, who pushed their subcontractors. The goal was to get the player into stores by Christmas 2001. Should I even take this seriously?' And: 'This seems totally foreign to [Apple's] business. Why would they buy this?' It was something non-computer-related.” Nonetheless, PortalPlayer, a small company, was thrilled to throw in its lot with Apple Computer, supplying the physical operating system and the external silicon casing. Rubinstein's team then hired Pixo, a software company founded by ex-Apple employee Paul Mercer, to write the programs for running the PortalPlayer chips. ”Apple wouldn't even show us what [the final device] looked like,” Mercer recalls. ”[The working model] had boards and a screen in the corner.” Jobs pushed his top lieutenants, who pushed the hardware and software teams, who pushed their subcontractors. The goal was to get the player into stores by Christmas 2001.

They still needed a name. Jobs was vague when The Perfect Thing The Perfect Thing author Levy asked him who thought it up. ”It sort of author Levy asked him who thought it up. ”It sort of emerged emerged,” Levy concluded, adding his speculation that Jobs was impatient and settled for it just before time ran out. Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter who worked regularly at Apple's Cupertino offices at the time, remembers otherwise. One of Apple's creative directors asked Chieco and a couple of other writers to come up with a number of names. The creative director, with help from Chieco, then narrowed down the list, put each name on a huge piece of paper and presented the top sixty or seventy prospects to Jobs in his office. Jobs whittled them down to three. Jobs had come up with one of them himself (Chieco won't say which one it was). Another, Pod Pod, was on Chieco's list. Jobs didn't immediately say he liked it, but he stopped holding meetings about the name. In pa.s.sing, he spoke positively of it to Chieco a couple of times. Then he ran it by Lee Clow, the TBWAChiatDay ad executive who would oversee the iPod ”Silhouettes” campaign. Clow liked it, too. ”Like everything else at Apple, it was [Jobs's] decision,” Chieco says. Jobs added the ”i”-as in iMac-and the name stuck.