The story of Tony Fadel, the engineer of Lebanese origin, and the device that changed Apple's history

In early 2001 while he was developing his own music player, Tony Fadell was chosen as a consultant to Apple, which asked him to create different prototypes for a digital music player that would work with the iTunes software that the company announced at the time. This device, and you will now join us to build it.”

Fadel led the team that built one of the most important products in Apple's history, a product still available on the company's website, and the iPod turned Apple from a company that struggled for sales and a small portion of the personal computer market into a powerhouse in consumer electronics.

The advent of the iPod also revolutionized the field of digital music as the era of CDs effectively ended and white music players (in reference to Apple's famous iPod) and white headphones became ubiquitous.

Most importantly, much of the early work on the iPod paved the way for the iPhone. Apple's next flagship productThe iPhone has changed almost everything about how we live and interact with our mobile devices and made Apple, now worth $2.42 trillion, the most valuable company in the world.

advisory position

John Rubinstein, Apple's vice president of engineering had been tasked with creating a music player in early 2001, and Tony Fadel was already working on his own company, Fuse Systems, with the goal of creating a pioneering music player. It was an emerging market with more than a dozen players from different companies including Creative Labs and RCA but the problem at the time was the sales of music players costing a few hundred dollars a piece but the total sales in the market did not exceed the 500 unit mark Only in the year 2000 according to the Consumer Electronics Association Fuse itself faced a lot of rejection. However, Fadel saw Apple's advisory position as an opportunity to fund his company and keep it alive. "I'm going to go work as a consultant and make some money and keep my company going," Fadel said at the time.

Fadel spent nearly seven weeks researching different options for a digital music player and relied on research from his own company and eventually built three Styrofoam mockups and used his grandfather's fishing weights to give them just the right amount of weight.

At the end of March 2001, Fadel worked with Stan Ng (then Vice President of Product Marketing) to prepare the papers for the presentation for Steve Jobs, who was known to be moody, to see. "That's what I want to do," he said.

Then it was time to show the prototypes and Fadel did what Stan had trained on him, showing the worst model first, then the second and finally his favorite as a last resort. “We're building this and now you're going to join us in building it,” Jobs said.

Fadel felt happy, but thoughts came to his mind, such as that Apple's entry into this market was not a sure bet, as the company's sales that came from Mac computers were declining, and Apple recorded a loss of $ 195 million in the previous quarter.

Fadel, who had spent the past decade working on hardware with limited success, could not load a disappointment again by building a music player that no one would buy.

Will the device work?

After a few weeks of negotiations with Jobs, Fadell joined Apple in April 2001 and put together a team made up of Fuse and General Magic employees to assemble what would become the iPod. The project immediately faced a daunting challenge. The team needed to work with a lot of new components including a brand-new hard drive from Toshiba that Rubinstein, who oversaw the entire project, identified as the main component of the iPod.

Other achievements included a new operating system for the user interface and a new lithium-ion battery that allows the device to run for 10 hours non-stop and no other competing device on the market can do that.

One of the obstacles that Fadel and the team faced was figuring out how to put the Toshiba drive on the iPod and it was a turntable that if it was handled incorrectly like when the device was dropped on the ground or thrown on the table, the disc would be damaged and the team had to integrate the cable Apple FireWire used to transfer files and device so that people can quickly transfer their songs.

All these challenges were for Fadel and the team to find solutions to and all Fadel knew was to get the iPod ready before Christmas 2001. Of course it was difficult as it takes about a year and a half to develop a new smartphone today and for Fadhel it started in May 2001 And he only has five months before the launch date.

Fadel team worked with the design group led by the famous Apple designer johnny ive In order to finalize the shape of the iPod and since the next generation of Macs will be white and transparent plastic, Apple has taken the same design and applied it to the iPod.

While working on the iPod, Fadel saw two other projects in the company being canceled, which prompted him to move even faster. When Jobs unveiled the iPod on October 23, 2011, during an Apple event at the Town Hall Coliseum in Cupertino, California, it wasn't The device is technically manufactured according to Fadel, the operating system has not been finalized and the manufacturing plan has not been signed by the company. But Jobs had ready-made samples to hand out to journalists along with 20 CDs of music preloaded to the device (journalists who got the iPod demo were asked to return it a few weeks later when the 1.0 version was on the market).

After the launch event, Fadel and his team got back to work right away, however, and the iPod gained critical acclaim for its new design and innovative navigation wheel.

The stages of development of the iPod

It is said that Apple sold 125 units of iPod during the initial holiday period, but these sales will not fundamentally change the company. That is why the desire to continue developing this device was an important part of a conversation Fadel had with Jobs that convinced him to join Apple.

Fadel asked the founder of Apple if he was willing to go further with the iPod and not just invest in this first unit but to commit to a lineup of products as Fadel was aware that the company was stopping work on other products after the first product was launched so Fadel wanted Ensure that this will not happen with him.

Jobs also told Fadell that he would be pouring marketing money into the iPod and pulling resources from the Mac's core business. Although the iPod sales were not above expectations, Jobs was supportive of Fadel and the development of the iPod and with the release of the third generation of the iPod in 2003, where it was elegantly redesigned, it began to spread widely. Fadel said he and Jobs were constantly pushing each other to take each version further and noted that Apple became the largest consumer of NAND flash memory when the iPod nano appeared.

The iPod got another boost in April 2003, when Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, giving people a way to purchase music from a catalog of 200 digital songs instead of having to burn their own CDs.

There were other digital music players before but the iPod changed everything. Not only did it legitimize this type of device, but it completely controlled it with more than 80% of the market share as Apple demonstrated its marketing prowess and created distinctive ads, remember the iPod silhouette ads where silhouettes of people dancing and having fun through the iPod were also used Jobs famous rock band U2 in 2004 in a special edition that included a black plastic design and a red click reel and on the back of the iPod there was the signature of the band members, which was laser engraved.

By 2007, just over five years after the original launch, Apple had sold 100 million units of the iPod. Business activity peaked in 2008 with sales of 54.8 million units and Tony Fadel was involved in many of the iPod making and development processes.

By 2005, Fadel said, Apple was already studying the competitive threat to mobile phones and had begun providing music playback software and cameras, so his team prototyped a full-screen iPod with a virtual clickwheel that was a mix of the iPod classic. And a mobile phone. Next, the Mac team built a massive touch screen the size of a ping-pong table, and Fadel said this combination of his team's models and that of the Mac team eventually led to the birth of the iPhone introduced in 2007 and Apple changed the world of technology again.

Finally, Apple still sells the iPod Touch at $199 and is more similar in design to the iPhone than the original music player. Perhaps the credit for Apple's arrival to what it is today is due to Tony Fadel, the American engineer of Lebanese origin who entrusted him and his team to build A product for the iTunes service, but ended up revolutionizing the market as he contributed to the introduction of both the iPod Touch and the first three generations of the iPhone, and then left Apple in 2008 and in 2010 started his own company, Nest, which he sold after Four years to Google for $3.2 billion and today he runs Future Shape, a consulting and investment firm that works with engineers on various aspects of technology.

Source:

cnet