When Apple executive Jon Rubinstein, who had been tasked with creating a music player, came knocking in early 2001, Fadell was already working on his own startup, Fuse Systems, with the goal of creating a mainstream MP3 player. It was a nascent market, with more than a dozen players from different companies including Creative Labs and RCA. The problem: Sales of the devices, which cost a few hundred dollars apiece, only totaled 500,000 units in 2000, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. Fuse itself faced plenty of rejection. Still, Fadell saw the Apple consulting gig as a chance to keep his own project alive. "I'm going to go in and consult," he said. "I'll make some money and keep my company going."He spent roughly seven weeks researching different options for a digital music player, pulling research from his own company. Ultimately, he built three mockups made of Styrofoam, and used his grandfather's fishing weights to give them the right amount of heft. At the end of March 2001, he presented them to Steve Jobs. Apple veteran Stan Ng had worked with Fadell to prepare a stack of papers for the presentation — this was before the days of slideshows — and prepared him for both Jobs and his reputation for an explosive temper. "Those stories were ingrained in my brain, burned into my brain, so I'm going in nervous," Fadell said. Jobs immediately took the stack of papers, riffled through the pages and quickly tossed them aside. "Here's what I want to do," Fadell recalled Jobs saying, hijacking the conversation and forcing them to dive right in. When presenting the models, Fadell did as Ng coached, showing off the worst model first, then the second and, finally, his favorite as the last option. Jobs seized on it immediately."Steve picked it up and he's like, 'we're building this and you're now going to join us to build it,' and I was like 'whoa whoa,'" Fadell said. It's easy to forget that Apple jumping into this market wasn't a sure-fire bet. The company's sales, which came from its Mac computers, were on the decline, and Apple had posted a loss of $195 million in the prior quarter. Fadell, who spent the past decade working on devices with "limited success," wasn't sure he could go through disappointment again by building an MP3 player no one would buy. No surprise, but Jobs got his way.
By 2005, Fadell said Apple was already looking at the competitive threat of cellphones, which started packing in music players and cameras. His team played with prototypes that included a full-screen iPod with a virtual click wheel and that essentially combined an iPod Classic and its wheel with a phone. The Mac team had separately built a massive capacitive touchscreen the size of a pingpong table. Fadell said a mashup of all three eventually led to the iPhone, which was introduced in 2007.
I still can't believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! Who cares about an MP3 player? I want something new! I want them to think differently!Why oh why would they do this?! It's so wrong! It's so stupid!
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Een van de beste producten van apple vind ik nog steeds de iPod Shuffle!