4 ms·

iPod Product Timeline

113 points by coloneltcb 7y ago

MontyCarloHall 7y ago
Seems like a huge omission to jump from >May (2nd week) Hired the first employee on the team immediately to >Oct (4th week) Launched iPod to the world
peterburkimsher 7y ago
I miss the 6-month iPod release cycle: every September there would be a new full size iPod, and every February there'd be a new Mini or Nano. Is there anyone else from the old iPodLinux community here? I was actively moderating the forums in 2005, and fixing countless iPods for friends at school/church. These days it seems like everybody's moved to Rockbox. I'm still using a 5.5G with a Kingspec SSD, and lots more gadgets fitted into the space where the HDD used to be. My favourite story from the iPodLinux days was cracking the 4G firmware. leachbj could only make the piezo work, but nilss then used that to dump the binary by making click noises in a soundproof box, and successfully reverse-engineered the rest of the firmware from that. https://web.archive.org/web/20140810083116/http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7085#.XhuoMuIzb6c https://web.archive.org/web/20140810083116/http://www.newsci...
- solstice 7y ago
  That's an amazing story!
akubera 7y ago
The "fast project page" this links to is pretty interesting: https://patrickcollison.com/fast https://patrickcollison.com/fast > The Empire State Building. Construction was started and finished in 410 days. > Unix. Ken Thompson wrote the first version in three weeks. > Git. Linus Torvalds started working on Git on April 3 2005. It was self-hosting 4 days later. Inspiring.
- MontyCarloHall 7y ago
  But also sobering: >San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. Its opening was recently delayed to 2021, yielding a project duration of around 7,300 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project will cost $310 million, i.e. $100,000 per meter. The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.
  - _tulpa 7y ago
    > The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars. 'the "highway" was not usable by general vehicles until 1943. Even then there were many steep grades, a poor surface, switchbacks to gain and descend hills ...' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Highway#Construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Highway#Construction) plus bridges which were temporary, impassable sections in 1943 when stuff started to melt, etc, etc ,etc. A war-time dirt-road constructed by the army and only traversable by stuff that could probably go off-road anyway is not really the same as building something in an existing city which has to support regular bus traffic.
  - iudqnolq 7y ago
    Yes, that's bad. Do keep in mind, though, that in quite a few places the Alaska Highway was just tundra. It was built in wartime (WW2) to get a land supply route to bases in Alaska as fast as possible. The intended use case was a convoy of military trucks with a engineers and repair gear who could fix the road as they travelled along it. Impressive, but different from a modern highway.
  - jsjohnst 7y ago
    Didn’t check the link to see if it’s listed, but another one would be the Second Ave “T” subway line in NYC. Originally started in ~1931, now it’s finally got a few sections built (part of the “Q” line now).
- dang 7y ago
fortran77 7y ago
They did some acquisitions, too. Like "Pixo" for the OS software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixo So you sort of need to include Pixo's timeline to get the real picture of the start-to-end-time
dsego 7y ago
I don't understand the comments about it being a revolutionary product. Do americans really not know about all the other cheap mp3 players that came before the ipod?
- nell 7y ago
  The answer is a question: Do you know of a successful mp3 product that came after iPod and took its market?
  - ianai 7y ago
    Aka an iPhone though they don’t really play flat files the same way. Only kind of a bummer in hindsight with nearly omnipresent data.
- akalin 7y ago
  "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
- wilg 7y ago
  Everything Is A Remix (https://vimeo.com/139094998 https://vimeo.com/139094998)
- dehrmann 7y ago
  There was a time I really wanted a Diamond Rio. It had 32MB of flash, but had an expansion slot for a SmartMedia card. Apparently, these were never made larger than 128MB. This wasn't even close to viable. At the time, you really needed the 1.8" HDD to make the device small enough, cheap enough, and with enough storage for more than two CDs.
mortenjorck 7y ago
Amazing to think that the original iPod could have gone from pitch to shipping in under a year. Today, the next iPhone is almost certainly in the late stages of engineering validation in January – and while there are many differences between the iPod and the iPhone, the biggest is definitely scale. Apple shipped 125,000 iPods in 2001. Today, they ship that many iPhones every six hours, or about 200 million per year. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-iphone-sales-since-3rd-quarter-2007/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-ipho...)

113 points by coloneltcb 7y ago

Seems like a huge omission to jump from >May (2nd week) Hired the first employee on the team immediately to >Oct (4th week) Launched iPod to the world

peterburkimsher 7y ago

I miss the 6-month iPod release cycle: every September there would be a new full size iPod, and every February there'd be a new Mini or Nano. Is there anyone else from the old iPodLinux community here? I was actively moderating the forums in 2005, and fixing countless iPods for friends at school/church. These days it seems like everybody's moved to Rockbox. I'm still using a 5.5G with a Kingspec SSD, and lots more gadgets fitted into the space where the HDD used to be. My favourite story from the iPodLinux days was cracking the 4G firmware. leachbj could only make the piezo work, but nilss then used that to dump the binary by making click noises in a soundproof box, and successfully reverse-engineered the rest of the firmware from that. https://web.archive.org/web/20140810083116/http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7085#.XhuoMuIzb6c https://web.archive.org/web/20140810083116/http://www.newsci...

solstice 7y ago
That's an amazing story!

akubera 7y ago

The "fast project page" this links to is pretty interesting: https://patrickcollison.com/fast https://patrickcollison.com/fast > The Empire State Building. Construction was started and finished in 410 days. > Unix. Ken Thompson wrote the first version in three weeks. > Git. Linus Torvalds started working on Git on April 3 2005. It was self-hosting 4 days later. Inspiring.

MontyCarloHall 7y ago
But also sobering: >San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. Its opening was recently delayed to 2021, yielding a project duration of around 7,300 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project will cost $310 million, i.e. $100,000 per meter. The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars.
- _tulpa 7y ago
  > The Alaska Highway, mentioned above, constructed across remote tundra, cost $793 per meter in 2019 dollars. 'the "highway" was not usable by general vehicles until 1943. Even then there were many steep grades, a poor surface, switchbacks to gain and descend hills ...' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Highway#Construction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Highway#Construction) plus bridges which were temporary, impassable sections in 1943 when stuff started to melt, etc, etc ,etc. A war-time dirt-road constructed by the army and only traversable by stuff that could probably go off-road anyway is not really the same as building something in an existing city which has to support regular bus traffic.
- iudqnolq 7y ago
  Yes, that's bad. Do keep in mind, though, that in quite a few places the Alaska Highway was just tundra. It was built in wartime (WW2) to get a land supply route to bases in Alaska as fast as possible. The intended use case was a convoy of military trucks with a engineers and repair gear who could fix the road as they travelled along it. Impressive, but different from a modern highway.
- jsjohnst 7y ago
  Didn’t check the link to see if it’s listed, but another one would be the Second Ave “T” subway line in NYC. Originally started in ~1931, now it’s finally got a few sections built (part of the “Q” line now).
dang 7y ago

fortran77 7y ago

They did some acquisitions, too. Like "Pixo" for the OS software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixo So you sort of need to include Pixo's timeline to get the real picture of the start-to-end-time

dsego 7y ago

I don't understand the comments about it being a revolutionary product. Do americans really not know about all the other cheap mp3 players that came before the ipod?

nell 7y ago
The answer is a question: Do you know of a successful mp3 product that came after iPod and took its market?
- ianai 7y ago
  Aka an iPhone though they don’t really play flat files the same way. Only kind of a bummer in hindsight with nearly omnipresent data.
akalin 7y ago
"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."
wilg 7y ago
Everything Is A Remix (https://vimeo.com/139094998 https://vimeo.com/139094998)
dehrmann 7y ago
There was a time I really wanted a Diamond Rio. It had 32MB of flash, but had an expansion slot for a SmartMedia card. Apparently, these were never made larger than 128MB. This wasn't even close to viable. At the time, you really needed the 1.8" HDD to make the device small enough, cheap enough, and with enough storage for more than two CDs.

mortenjorck 7y ago

Amazing to think that the original iPod could have gone from pitch to shipping in under a year. Today, the next iPhone is almost certainly in the late stages of engineering validation in January – and while there are many differences between the iPod and the iPhone, the biggest is definitely scale. Apple shipped 125,000 iPods in 2001. Today, they ship that many iPhones every six hours, or about 200 million per year. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-iphone-sales-since-3rd-quarter-2007/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-ipho...)