[entrepy123]

Impressive for sure, not to knock it. But, as I recall reading, the mini HDD for the iPod was already developed by a vendor's R&D, sitting around for a use case. Which Apple decided to take exclusive advantage of. Thus, that iPod offering seemed kind of "revolutionary". But it's not like Apple started the project, then developed all of the tech for it in this time of 290 days. Which is sort of what the summary reads like, to me. So I'm adding this comment, for clarification. (Heck, the story I read about the first iPod and its HDD was probably originally linked from HN!)

[gizmo]

They had to design the software, the UX including the touch wheel, the mac integration and syncing, and everything relating to the design, materials, and sourcing of the components. It’s astonishing that they got it done in less than a year. (And I highly recommend Fadell’s book)

[giantrobot]

The iPod's OS was bought off the shelf. All of the music library functionality and a lot of the sync functionality already existed within SoundJa...iTunes.

That's not to knock the speed of the iPod's development but it wasn't built totally from scratch. Apple also wasn't a garage startup, peeling some hardware engineers off for the iPod wasn't going to cripple the iMac's continued development.

[rglover]

The UX of the touch wheel was wholesale ripped off of Dieter Rams. I love Jony Ive but he (technically, the rumor is it was Phil Schiller) ganked/remixed that one: https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/141242/what-was-the-i...

[crazygringo]

Everything around the software would have been quick -- both the iPod UX and syncing were extremely simple back then. The iPod didn't really have a GUI, it was just six lines of text and a header line.

It's the manufacturing speed that astonishes me -- the sourcing as you say, the supply chains and the factory capacity. I'm also very curious about the manufacture of the scroll wheel -- was that something really new that had to be figured out (it seemed/felt like it) or was it a trivial combination of existing components?

[ricardobeat]

Most inventions become trivial right after they are released. Creation, research, design are the hard parts, and you cannot judge those by the complexity of the final product.

[norir]

Wow, I did not know that story but it makes so much sense that the ipod was an almost inevitable development from the mini hdd. Goes to show how important it is to have people who can see the big picture and find the right people to execute.

[danudey]

It's worth noting that hard-drive based MP3 players did exist at the time, but they had several drawbacks that Apple found solutions for.

First, they used physically larger 2.5" hard drives, making them larger and heavier. The small 1.8" HDD that the iPod used allowed it to be the size of a deck of cards, meaning it was much more portable.

Secondly, hard drives consume a large amount of power to operate, so HDD-based players had terrible battery life because it was always spinning up the disk to get the next song. The iPod solved this by just adding 32 MB of RAM as a cache, so when you started an album the system would just read in the next 15 minutes (or so? that's about 30 MB at 160 kbit) of songs and then power down the HDD until the cache was running out or the user changed albums/playlists/tracks.

It was also fast; using firewire to transfer songs restricted it to Mac users at first, but it meant that you could rip a new CD and put it on your iPod in a short amount of time, or, later, buy an album on iTunes and have it ready for your jog in ten minutes.

It's funny to think how many people saw the iPod as an obvious immediate failure. As the infamous Slashdot post[0] said, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

[0] https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

[wmf]

We got samples of the Toshiba 1.8" drive at IBM Research around August 2001 for the Super Dense Server prototype and I remember thinking how neat they were and wondering what else they could be used for.

[pedalpete]

Also, don't forget that Tony Fadell had been built many MP3 players before, so for him it was more like an iteration than starting from scratch.

[yellow_lead]

Much of these examples similarly lack any info on prior work. i.e mRNA COVID vaccines were completed quickly, after years of prior research.

[samtho]

We are all standing on the shoulders of giants. I don’t see the same criticism for anything else that required prior human knowledge and achievement.

[selcuka]

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe" -- Carl Sagan