With iPod’s fifth birthday around the corner, Steve Jobs discusses the MP3 player’s design, the cool factor and the impact on how we listen to music.
Oct. 23 marks the fifth anniversary of Apple’s iPod. CEO Steve Jobs reflected with NEWSWEEK’s Steven Levy (author of “The Perfect Thing,” a book about the iPod out this month) about the past, present and future of the device that changed Apple—and the world.
NEWSWEEK: During the iPod’s development process did you get a sense of how big it would become?
Steve Jobs: The way you can tell that you’re onto something interesting is if everybody who knows about the project wants one themselves, if they can’t wait to go out and open up their own wallets to buy one. That was clearly the case with the iPod. Everybody on the team wanted one.
Other companies had already tried to make a hard disk drive music player. Why did Apple get it right?
We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless.
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