Tony Fadell (Tony Fadell), known as the "father of the iPod", released his new book "Build" this week, about his work in Silicon Valley companies for 30 years. The story behind the year. In an interview with CNBC's Jon Fortt, Fadell shared more details about the early stages of the iPod and iPhone, as well as Jobs' controversial decision.
Decisions on iPods - Compatibility with Windows PCs
Fadell was hired by Apple in 2001 to help the company develop its music strategy, which inevitably involved the iPod. As he mentioned in the interview, there were several MP3 players before the iPod, and they had become quite popular at the time. However, none of them are simple enough for people who "just want to play MP3s".
The idea within Apple is to democratize the MP3 player experience. In the words of the engineer: "Everyone loves music, the audience is everywhere". Unlike the competition, however, the iPod had to be easy to use, have good battery life, blazing-fast data transfer speeds, and store more than 1,000 songs.
According to Fadell, this is one of the reasons why Apple uses FireWire instead of USB. The original USB standard was super slow, with a maximum speed of only 12Mbps (ie 1.5MB/s), while the transmission bandwidth of FireWire at that time had exceeded 100Mbps (12.5MB/s). There's more to Apple's decision than that alone.
Another reason is to make iPods incompatible with Windows PCs. Users need a Mac in order to transfer songs to an iPod. From day one, I (Fadell) said, "We have to make sure it connects to Windows." And he (Steve) said, "Until I die, never."
Jobs believed that the iPod would persuade Windows users to switch to the Mac. However, the number of people buying Macs for iPods has remained low. And the fact that you have to use a Mac to transfer songs to the iPod also affects iPod sales, because it greatly raises the bar for those who don't have a Mac at home.
Even so, Jobs rejected the idea of making the iPod compatible with any Windows PC. At this point, Fadell and the iPod team contacted journalist Walt Mossberg, a friend of Jobs' friends, who hoped he could help convince Jobs to make the iPod compatible with Windows.
Jobs didn't want to change his mind, Fadell said, but Mossberg's help showed Jobs that opening the iPod to Windows PCs would be the right thing to do. It turns out that Mossberg and Fadell were right.
Decisions about the iPhone - whether to let the iPhone run third-party apps
Back in 2007, when Jobs released the iPhone, he disapproved of the device running third-party applications. However, when the iPhone came out, developers, especially businesses, wanted to install their applications on the iPhone.
So Apple came up with a "sweet solution" to promote the development of web apps that run through the Safari browser. Interestingly, Fadell revealed in the interview that the idea of web applications was strongly supported by then Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt, who sits on Apple's board of directors, was also heavily involved in the development of the iPhone because of its many Google services built into it. For Fadell, Schmidt "was a little excited" when he first saw a web app running on the iPhone.
However, as we know, web apps are not that great. At the same time, iPhone sales weren't great, so Jobs saw an opportunity to launch the App Store and use the iPhone's apps to "lock" people into the ecosystem.
In the full hour-long interview, Fadell also shared more details about other moments in his career and personal life. After leaving Apple in 2008, he founded his own company, "Nest Labs," to create smart home devices, which was later acquired by Google.
Editor's Note: FireWire, literally translated as "FireWire" in Chinese, is a connection system for high-speed peripheral devices, formerly known as IEEE 1394, or 1394 for short, which is the Apple version of the international industrial standard (high-performance serial bus). The IEEE1394 interface was originally developed by Developed by Apple, it was originally designed to replace the SCSI interface. It was basically developed in 1996 and has been placed on Apple computers since 1999, such as Power Macintosh, and then expanded to the notebook series (PowerBook) in 2000. Since 2001 Years have been common for all new Apple computers.
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