Ten years ago today I found myself at the new Tice's Corner Applestore in Woodcliff Lake, NJ first in a line of about 20 people queued up to buy the original iPod. A call from the store's manager to a wait list told me they would open their doors at 8 am. I was there before 7 am and we were let in at 7 sharp. It is possible I had one of the first sold in the US. There was even a tshirt that is now long gone and I remember someone had brought in a pile of freshly based chocolate chip cookies.
I'm not the type who waits in line to be first with a new piece of tech. Why was I there?
A few weeks before Steve Jobs had introduced to a very skeptical press. The speculation of Apple's special event was basically anything but an mp3 player. $399 for a 5 GB, Mac only, firewire connected mp3 player.
I knew I had to have one.
Fortunately my wife and I have "fun money" accounts. Sums of money that each of us has complete control over that the other person can't touch or criticize. It isn't a lot, but let's me do things like score an original iPod.
Since 1998 or so it was clear that small hard disk based mp3 players would be practical sometime in 2001 or possibly 2002. My HCI department had been working on music at many levels collaborating with other departments at AT&T Research. Sound field reconstruction, streaming, interface work, music business work, codec tuning, and the anthropology and sociology of music. We even had a little flanker brand digital music label - perhaps the second or third strangest thing I did at the Labs.
Part of this work included some hardware designs including a series of pocket players based on flash memory good for a perhaps a dozen songs. We had a mule with a "huge" 360 megabyte IBM microdrive that could hold about 100 songs and we quickly discovered the interface that sort of worked with a dozen failed miserably at 100. Quite a bit of thought went into cracking the problem leading to some other - er - unique interfaces including one that responded to the sound of brushing your fingers together. But basically nothing worked.
I heard about the unveiling of the early iPod in September and saw the scroll wheel. It instantly hit me they had cracked the problem.
Of course I had to buy one and $399 seemed cheap for a 5 GB player. I was using a Mac so I was in good shape. My only wish was that it would use AAC rather than mp3. AAC was the codec we had been working with and it was vastly superior. We had several meetings with Apple, including Jobs, showing him that starting in 1999. He was probably listening to a lot of people.
I rushed home - Woodcliff Lake isn't exactly close to Basking Ridge - and started to transfer music. The interface felt wonderful. It was beautifully analog and had inertia. It felt like something worth the money - not the cheap poorly built plastic of everything else on the market. Although spendy it seemed like a very fair trade for four Franklins.
I still have mine and it still works well. I take it out for a walk about once a month to remind myself of a watershed in interface design. It seemed so obvious once I had seen it. I've read that the scrolling motion created some excitement in Apple and people started looking more deeply into multitouch interfaces- something that had been around in the labs since the late 1980s, but still expensive and researchy. This is probably about the time they figured they could begin to build insight on a viable tablet - a project that became the iPhone and later the iPad.
The early sales were not good and the tech pundits pronounced it another silly Apple failure. Only Mac users could use it and after the initial small surge there wasn't a big market. Apple made it work with Windows, added AAC and then came the iTunes music store and a standardization on AAC. These changes, combined with prices dropping into the $250 to $300 range saw sales begin to boom by 2004. Back then it was still very popular to talk about the likely failure of Apple, but people interested in music were packing iPods. A new generation was getting use to Apple products and people were listening to music in different ways.
The anthropology of music is fascinating and I think it isn't as investigated to the degree it deserves. There are many ways to go, but the iPod and iTunes made a fundamental difference. It also probably saved the music business from a fate worse than what unrolled, but that is a story for another day.
I can think of a lot of things that we haven't seen yet. Music is still a fundamentally important thing we humans do (it exists in every known culture on the planet) - Steve was right to go after it and his timing was close to perfect. When I see what Björk and a few others are doing I have a feeling that perhaps the generation coming up now will be much more compositionally literate. The iPad is the breakthrough device for those efforts and the initial work is - well - very early, but the way composition is approached may take a big leap.
Steve would like that. Most of the interactions I've had with him have invovled the arts in some way (odd when you think about it). A common point he kept coming back to was he would consider what he was doing a success if Apple products became a basis for getting more people doing creative artwork of some kind. He was fascinated by the notion that music composition may not be as difficult as most of us assume it is. That gets into the subject of education vs training, but for another day...
Once a month is it still nice to plug in the original to a firewire cable and see it come alive. It is ancient and outmoded, but the leap it made was breathtaking.
What a great purchase!
There is a curious feature of many disruptive technologies - most of the technical pundits fail to recognize them as disruptive. Many of them have a very different evolutionary path that is rarely foreseen. I was lucky enough to (a) not have been a technical pundit and (b) have been working on the problem for long enough to recognize the brilliance of the interface.
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