Tony Fadell started out as a contractor here at Apple. He brought him his designs for a media player and a team merged that with the small hard drives that Hita

Tony Fadell started out as a contractor here at Apple. He brought him his designs for a media player and a team merged that with the small hard drives that Hitachi was peddling and from there on it grew into the original iPod prototype. Tony is now a VP. iTunes was bought, sure the codebase (rebooted from 4.0 and onward) is different but it was bought in. Just like almost all the pro tools and that has now since been revamped. My point still stands: after Steve Jobs came back what Apple has really done well is taking parts/ideas off the shelves and developing them into wonderful consumer products.