IT House May 5 news, according to 9to5mac news, known as the "father of the iPod" Tony Fadell (Tony Fadell) this week released his new book "Build", telling the story behind his 30 years of work at Silicon Valley companies. In an interview with CNBC's Jon Fortt, Fadel shared more details about the early stages of the iPod and iPhone' development, as well as Jobs's controversial decision.
Decision about iPod – compatibility with Windows PCs
Fadal was hired by Apple in 2001 to help the company develop its music strategy, which necessarily involved the iPod. As he mentioned in the interview, there were already a variety of MP3 players before the iPod, and they had become quite popular at the time. However, for people who "just want to play MP3", they are not simple enough.
The idea within Apple is to democratize this experience of MP3 players. In the words of the engineer: "Everyone loves music, and the audience is everywhere". Unlike its competitors, however, the iPod must be simple to use, have good battery life, extremely fast data transfer speeds, and be able to 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 of only 12Mbps (i.e. 1.5MB/s), while FireWire already had more than 100Mbps (12.5MB/s) of transmission bandwidth at that time. There is more than one reason for Apple's decision.
Another reason is that the iPod is not compatible with the Windows PC. Users need a Mac in order to transfer songs to iPod. From day one, I [Fadel] said, "We have to make sure it connects to Windows." And he (Steve) said, "Never before I die." ”
Jobs believed the iPod would convince Windows users to switch to macs. However, the number of users who buy a Mac for an iPod is always low. And the fact that transferring songs to the iPod requires the use of a Mac also affects iPod sales, because for those who don't have a Mac at home, this greatly raises the threshold for iPod use.
Even so, Jobs opposed the idea of making the iPod compatible with any Windows PC. At this point, Fadell and the iPod team contacted reporter Walt Mossberg, a friend of Jobs's, hoping he could help persuade Jobs to make the iPod compatible with Windows.
Fadell mentioned that Jobs didn't want to change his mind, but Mossberg's help showed Jobs that opening up the iPod to Windows PCs would be the right choice. As it turned out, Mossberg and Fadell were right.
Decision about iPhone – Whether to let iPhone run third-party apps
Back in 2007, when Jobs released the iPhone, he didn't approve of the device running third-party applications. However, when the iPhone came out, developers, especially businesses, wanted to install their apps on the iPhone.
So Apple came up with a "sweet solution" to facilitate the development of web applications that run through Safari. Interestingly, Fadell revealed in an interview that the idea of a web app was strongly supported by then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt is a member of Apple's board of directors, and he was heavily involved in the development of the iPhone because it has a variety of Google services built in. For Fadell, Schmidt was "a little excited" when he first saw the web app running on his iPhone.
However, as we know, web applications are not so good. At the same time, iPhone sales were not satisfactory, so Jobs saw an opportunity to launch the App Store and use the iPhone's apps to "lock" people into the ecosystem.
In a full one-hour 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 were later acquired by Google.
Editor's note: FireWire, Chinese literally translated as "FireWire", is a connection system for high-speed peripherals, formerly known as IEEE 1394, or simply 1394, is the Apple version of the international industry standard (high-performance serial bus), the IEEE1394 interface was originally developed by Apple, early designed to replace the SCSI interface, basically developed in 1996, and has been placed on Apple computers since 1999, such as the Power Macintosh, It was then expanded to the PowerBook series in 2000 and has been available to all new Apple computers since 2001.