iPod

Aruna NaikBUS 527

Portable Music Device • First invented in 1954, billions of transistor radios were

produced and sold through the 1960s and 1970s– They were the first devices to allow people on the move

to listen to music anywhere they went

• The Sony Walkman compact cassette player soon became the ascendant model and very popular, dominating the market through the 1980s– The Walkman, in fact, then defined the portable music

market, selling 300 million units in two decades

• By the mid-1990s, however, a new form of digital music, made possible by MP3 files

• By January 2001, Jobs and Apple launched an early version of something they called iTunes for the Macintosh computer– It helps Mac users to organize digital music files on their

computers– Converts audio CDs into compressed digital files, and

play internet radio music

The beginning of iTunes• It didn’t take long to Jobs realize that music was going to be huge by 2000

– Sold 320 millions blank CDs in the US and population was only 281millions (2000) – I felt like a dope," he told Fortune

• Bill Kincaid, a former Apple software engineer, while driving listening to National Public Radio about portable music player called the “Reo” that played a digital song format called MP3

• Bill Kincaid and Jeff Robbin developed SoundJam MP with assistance from Dave Heller (all former software engineers)

– SoundJam MP was an early Mac OS compatible MP3 player and Rio-compatible hardware synchronization manager that was released in July 1998 and was available until June 2001

– Jobs personally worked with them to transform SoundJam into an Apple product– Apple, Inc. purchased SoundJam MP in 2000 and further developed the code to

create iTunes version 1.0

• On January 9, 2001, Apple debuted iTunes 1.0 to the public.  iTunes would become a very successful music-selling business and a key component in the iPod’s success    

That wasn’t enough!• Jobs realized that Apple had the opportunity to design such a device tandem

with the iTunes software, allowing it to be simpler– Complex tasks could be handled on the computer, easy ones on the device– Thus was born the “iPod”, the device that would bring transformation of being

Apple from a computer maker into being the world’s most valuable company

• While building iTunes Jobs began to push for portable music player in fall 2000, but Jon Rubenstein responded that the necessary components were not available yet

• After a few months Rubinstein able to score a suitable LCD screen with a rechargeable lithium polymer battery

– The tough challenge was finding a disc drive that was small enough but ample memory to make a great music player

– In Feb 2001, While on a routine supplier visit to Toshiba Corp, the engineers mentioned a new product they had in the lab that would be ready by that June. It was a tiny, 1.8-inch drive (the size of a silver dollar) that would hold five gigabytes of storage (about a thousand songs), and they were not sure what to do with it

– Apple negotiating with Toshiba to have exclusive rights to every one of the disks it could make

iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, iPod Classic, iPod Touch

• $400 price tag, the unconventional scroll wheel and the lack of Windows compatibility. Despite all this, the iPod sold beyond everyone's expectations

>300 million iPods sold >10 billion songs have been sold

via iTunes

iPod a “breakthrough digital device.” 

“Download an entire CD in under 10 seconds and 1,000 songs in less than 10 minutes”

"1,000 songs in your pocket.“

“You can put your whole music library into your pocket,”

iPod and iTunes

By July 2004, when Newsweek put Steve Jobs on its magazine cover holding an iPod with the tagline, “iPod, Therefore i Am” the iPod revolution was fully in progress.  Steve Levy’s story inside the magazine, titled “iPod Naiton,”

Apple - iPod + iTunes, http://www.apple.com/itunes/, Screen clipping taken: 2007/3/6, 08:02

Campaign Begins • The silhouettes advertising

campaign proved to be a key component in Apple’s success

• The ads drew in millions of new consumers and pointed the business in a substantially new direction

• It was the simple but powerful imagery of the free-spirited dancers in these ads that helped imprint “the Apple style” around the world

• When one sees dark silhouetted figures dancing against bright-colored backgrounds, the iPod instantly comes to mind.

iPod Commercial

“Silhouette History” • One blogger, Lexie Brown, wrote in

2010

Noticed some similarities between the iPod silhouettes and the work of artist Henri Matisse, and especially as seen in some of his cut-outs, such as Icarus from 1947

• Writer Seth Stevenson reminded of a mid-1990s campaign for DeBeers diamonds

couple is shown as shadows, but only the jewelry – ring or necklace typically – is highlighted

iTunes Music Store iTunes Store• The iTunes Store was first launched on April 28, 2003. Apple’s idea was

simple –- provide a virtual store where people can buy and download digital music on-demand

• Initially, the store only hosted 200,000 tracks and only Mac users were able to buy and transfer music to the iPod. PC users had to wait until October 2003 for the release of the Windows version of iTunes. Today, the iTunes Store is the largest seller of digital music in the US and has sold over 10 billion songs

• During Apple’s early days, the iTunes Store was only available to U.S customers. This changed in 2004 when a series of European launches took place

• Global launches continued throughout the world over the years making the iTunes Store the most widespread digital music service in the world

Achievements

Steve Jobs introducing the iTunes Music Store on Apr. 28, 2003

• 70 million songs sold in its first year

• 1 million music videos sold 20 days after first being introduced in 2005

• 2006: 1 billion songs downloaded and a gain of 88% of the legal music download market share (U.S.) 25billion songs sold worldwide by Feb 2013

• 2007: The iTunes Store became the most popular destination in the world to download movies; 2 million movies had been sold

• 2008: Apple announced >4 billion songs were download and that it had became the second largest retailer of digital music in the US

• 2011: 15 billion apps downloaded

Business Models – How to compete against Free

• Jobs’s proposal was to sell digital songs for 99 cents—a simple and impulsive purchase. The record companies would get 70 cents of that

• Selling individual songs versus Monthly subscription model. He believed that people had an emotional connection to the songs they loved

• Conflict with the record companies, which made money by putting out albums that had two or three great songs and a dozen or so fillers; to get the song they wanted, consumers had to buy the whole album

• “There’s a flow to a good album, The songs support each other.” But the objections were moot

• Piracy and online downloads had already deconstructed the album,”. He knew that the only way to stop piracy was to offer an attractive alternative.  “You couldn’t compete with piracy unless you sold the songs individually.”

At the heart of the problem was a chasm between the people who loved technology and those who loved artistry. Jobs loved both, as he had demonstrated at Pixar and Apple, and he was thus positioned to bridge the gap.

Simplicity: Design Principle #1• "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." Leonardo da Vinci

• Simplicity: The Elimination of Clutter

• “He made devices simpler by eliminating buttons, software simpler by eliminating features, and interfaces simpler by eliminating options.”

乾以易知，坤以簡能。易則易知，簡則易從。易知則有親，易從則有功。有親則可久，有功則可大。可久則賢人之德，可大則賢人之業。易簡而天下之理得矣。天下之理得而成位乎其中矣。

Love What You Do Compassion

• And the only way to do great work is to love what you do

• Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition

• You've got to find what you love. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle

「你的麵包沒有生命、感覺、和感動。」-- 陳輔光 to 吳寶春 兩個關鍵的因素，一是品味，一是技術。 ..寶春的瓶頸來自於不曉得什麼叫做「好吃」，更枉論瞭解消費者想要的口味！http://100.chinatimes.com/report/100/news-cnt-20111230-1.htm

• Jobs and Sheryl Crow, photographed in 2003, by Michael O'Neill for a story on the introduction of the iTunes Music Store. O'Neill says the feeling on the set was playful and fun. "Steve Jobs seemed to have a wonderful time, Sheryl Crow sang and played guitar briefly and they both seemed star struck." After the photo shoot with both subjects, O'Neill had to shoot Steve solo; O'Neill wanted to photograph Jobs holding a CD -- the photographer loved the disc's reflective quality and thought it could add shape and color. Jobs refused because not necessarily because he felt silly, but because he said CDs would not be around in two years.

Visionary

Why iPod instead MP3 player?

• It's proprietary

– Cheap plastic or looking fake product versus impressive industrial designed beautiful aluminium perfection product

• Apple believed the iPod represented the perfect compromise between size and storage capacity

– weighing about 6.5 ounces.  Roughly equivalent to the size of a pack of cigarettes

– 5 GB hard drive – enough capacity to put “1,000 songs

• It has an extremely broad feature set. They also have the best battery life (by far) of any MP3 player

• Simplicity, seamless integration with its iTunes software

• The reason iPod took off is largely due to its use with iTunes

– iTunes was the first online music store to sign with all five major record labels of the time and provide legal music downloads at a minimal price

– Currently, it is the largest online music store on the Internet with more than six million available tracks. 

• There is no real difference between an iPod and any other MP3 player, except iPod has managed to take a potentially confusing process and make it easy, even for Grandma