Contents
Introduction: I Am a Jukebox……………………………………………………………1
1: Steve Jobs Changes His World…………………………………………………………5
2: I Came, iPod, I Conquered……………………………………………………………14
3: The Single: Seven Inches of Aural Sex…………………………………………………27
4: A Glamour Profession………………………………………………………………..39
5: Build It and They Will Come………………………………………………………….50
6: iBondage, Up Yours! It’s Time for Punk!……………………………………………….70
7: Steve Jobs Approximately…………………………………………………………….85
8: Yowsah Yowsah Yowsah: Disco, Soul, & Sex!……………………………………………..95
9: Digital Dreams: It’s a CD!…………………………………………………………..112
10: The Virtual Megastore: Apple Launches iTunes………………………………………….125
11: iPod a Spell on You………………………………………………………………..137
12: How “i” Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Jazz………………………………………..155
13: iPod, uPod, We All Shop for iPod…………………………………………………….166
14: Ask Not What You Can Do for Your iPod, Ask What Your iPod Can Do for You…………………176
15: Journey to the Center of the iPod……………………………………………………188
Appendix……………………………………………………………………………..201
The iPod’s Greatest Hits: 100 Songs You Absolutely Must Have in Your Life……………………205
Chapter One
Steve Jobs Changes His World
What you didn’t know about the Apple CEO
Sometimes, critical mass happens when we least expect it.
Early in 2004 Steve Jobs noticed something as he was walking
through New York City. “I was on Madison,” said the
Apple CEO, “and it was, like, on every block, there was
someone with white headphones, and I thought, ‘Oh, my
God, it’s starting to happen.'” Bizarrely, Jonathan Ive, the
company’s sought-after style guru and the man behind the
design of the iPod, had a similar experience in London: “On
the streets and coming out of the Tube, you’d see people fiddling
with it.” By the summer of 2004 Apple had sold more
than three million iPods to three million people for whom
the little plastic and chrome computer with the capacious
disc drive had become a way of life. It had sold them to Will
Smith, Gwyneth Paltrow, Bill Clinton, Jamie Cullum, Sheryl
Crow, Kevin Bacon, Public Enemy’s Chuck D, Alanis Morissette,
David Bowie, Ice T, Robbie Williams, and every other
compressed, digitized celebrity worth his or her salt. The
couturier Karl Lagerfeld bought himself sixty of the damn
things, coded on their backs by laser etching so he could tell
them apart (he even commissioned a pink copper rectangular
purse to hold twelve at any one time). Vanity Fair editor
Graydon Carter was given his by Steve Earle (who had already
filled it with five thousand of his favorite songs). By
April 2002 Apple’s iPod had 51 percent of the digital music
player market, with the remaining 49 percent being split
with the Rio, RCA Lycra, iRiver, and Digital Way (digital
music players you never, ever wanted to be seen with). By
2008 there will be eighteen million digital players in the
world, and more than ten million of those will be iPods.
Suddenly, people were no longer listening to Walkmans-why
would they, when they could carry their entire record
collection around with them? Why limit yourself to sixty,
ninety minutes of music when you could have forty thousand
minutes on tap, at the turn of a wheel? Suddenly the iPod
had galvanized a generation. In a Yahoo survey, a fifth of
British backpackers said they wouldn’t leave home without
one. Although unlike previous musical revolutions, this was
embraced by a much wider demographic, a demographic
that had (a) access to a computer, (b) the means to buy a digital
music player, and (c) taste in music-any taste. The fans
of the iPod were not just eighteen years old; they were
twenty-five, thirty, forty-five, sixty. Owners consumed everything
from Maroon 5 to Beethoven, from Nirvana to Pink
Floyd. They listened to their little white machines on the bus,
on the subway, on the train, in the bath. Everywhere. Almost
overnight, the iPod became a private club with a membership
of millions. And not only did people begin buying
iPods, they started buying iPod accessories-often third-party
accessories-with a frenzy not seen since the dot-com
boom at the end of the last century (when all people were
buying were shares in dreams): external speakers (Altec
Lansing in particular), microphones, leather carriers, plastic
“skins,” iTrip transmitters that amplified the iPod through a
car stereo, even special adaptors to fit a BMW or Smart car,
enabling people to play their iPods on the journey to work
(or, if the inclination strikes, Shanghai …). It was the first
gadget to really appeal to the fickle consumer as well as to
the computer nerd. And everyone found a different use for it.
Sure, you could store your entire collection of Bob Dylan albums
on it (should any such thing be attractive to a person),
but its vast storage space made it a useful vault for all manner
of digital files: the makers of the Lord of the Rings films
used iPods to transport dailies from the film set to the studio.
When Steve Jobs returned to the company he cofounded
in i997, there were no plans for a digital music player-far
from it. But having failed to notice the impending explosion
in digital music, he set about creating a piece of “jukebox”
software soon to be known as iTunes.
The story of Apple is a convoluted one, but a story that
nonetheless makes for easy reading. Having dropped out of
university in Oregon in the early 1970s, the long-haired,
sandal-wearing, teenage Jobs, who lived entirely on fruit,
teamed up with school friend Steve Wozniak and, in true
American dream fashion, invented the world’s first bonafide
personal computer in Jobs’s stepfather’s garage. The computer,
he’d tell anyone who’d listen, was going to be the bicycle
of the mind. When the two met, doing summer work at
Hewlett-Packard, Wozniak was only eighteen, and Jobs just
thirteen. Jobs was never an underachiever (How could he be?
After all, he was born and raised in Palo Alto, California,
soon to become Silicon Valley)-he was a believer.
To finance the company-Apple was named after his
favorite fruit-Jobs sold his Volkswagen camper van and
Wozniak his treasured programmable computer, which
raised $1,300. Weeks later, Jobs secured his first order of
fifty Apple I computers. Semi-cased in timber and initially
costing $666.66, the original 1975 Apple is today enshrined
in the Smithsonian Institution, where it looks so much older
than it actually is (once compared to a component from a
1930s telephone exchange, it made a Mackintosh chair look
positively high tech). Unreliable and bulky, it was not a great
success, and so they started again, coming up with the Apple
II, not the world’s first personal computer, but soon the
most popular (plastic case, built-in keyboard, colored
graphics, the lot). It defined low-end computers for decades
to come, and it was said that twenty-third-century archaeologists
excavating some ancient PC World stockroom would
see no significant functional difference between an Apple II
from 1978 and an IBM PS/2 from i992.
Many schools found that buying a few Apples was a
cheap way to add computing to their curriculum. Apple II’s
breakthrough was an application called VisiCale, the first
proper spreadsheet, released in 1979, when Jobs was twenty-four.
Between i978 and 1983, Apple sales grew by 150 percent
a year, but those sales were based on the home and education
markets. Jobs realized that the big money to be made
from desktop computing would come from the business
world. Apple needed to get into offices; they needed a business
computer. And so they launched the Apple III. But,
like the Apple I, it was a bomb-it ran hot and frequently
crashed and was soon overtaken in sales by IBM’s recently
launched PC. It was 1981 and Apple didn’t know what to do
next.
Two years later Jobs called John Sculley, then at Pepsi,
and asked him to become president of Apple. “If you stay at
Pepsi, five years from now all you’ll have accomplished is
selling a lot more sugar water to kids,” Jobs told him. “If
you come to Apple, you can change the world.” So Sculley
joined, leaving Jobs to obsess about creating the perfect low-cost
computer. Jobs devoted all his time to this project, while
Sculley ran the company, which, he soon discovered, was an
organizational mess (rivals referred to Apple’s Cupertino,
California, headquarters as “Camp Runamok”). Jobs had
not only met his nemesis; he’d employed him, and given him
the power to fire him. Which is exactly what Sculley did.
Eventually, a frustrated Sculley concluded that the main reason
for Apple’s problems was Jobs’s erratic management
style, and so stripped him of his day-to-day responsibilities.
Jobs may have been erratic, but it was his passion that
drove him on. By the early 1980s Apple had expanded to
such an extent that its campus was scattered across more
than a dozen buildings in Cupertino, buildings that were full
of engineers, designers, technicians, marketers, publicists,
couriers, most of whom dressed in the regulation Silicon
Valley uniform of T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. As everyone
looked the same-how could you tell if there was an IBM or
a Compaq spy in the house?-it was decided that ID badges
should be introduced: Steve Wozniak was declared employee
number 1, Steve Jobs was number 2, and so on. But Jobs
didn’t want to be number 2; in fact he didn’t want to be
number 2 in anything. And so he argued that it was he, and
not Wozniak, who should be the sacred number 1 since they
were cofounders of the company and J came before W in the
alphabet. Childish, yes, but then this was what Jobs was like.
When the plan was rejected, he argued that as the number o
was unassigned, he’d be quite happy to have it. Which he
did, and as o came before I, he was technically top dog. It
didn’t matter that Wozniak was the chief technician and designer;
Jobs had his number. “Steve Jobs created chaos because
he would get an idea, start a project, then change his
mind two or three times, until people were doing a kind of
random walk, continually scrapping and starting over,” says
one insider. “Apple was confusing suppliers and wasting
huge amounts of money doing initial manufacturing steps
on products that never appeared.”
In 1986 Sculley relieved Jobs of his chairmanship, ironically
just eighteen months after Apple had launched its
breakthrough product, the Macintosh, a computer with a
built-in screen and a mouse-and-click user interface (and
called Macintosh after the favorite apple variety of its designer,
Jef Raskin). At last, computers were accessible to the
average user, who no longer had to type in obscure demands
to carry out simple tasks. They created screen icons, cleaned
up the keyboard, and successfully demystified the computing
process. Jobs, always a master of marketing, propelled
sales with a TV ad, directed by Ridley Scott, featuring an
athlete being chased by storm troopers past throngs of
vacant-eyed workers and hurling a sledgehammer at a menacing
Big Brother face staring out of a screen. The message
was that 1984 would not be Orwell’s but Apple’s. Jobs said
at the time, “We started out to get a computer in the hands
of everyday people, and we succeeded beyond our wildest
dreams.” The Macintosh’s technology was so advanced that
the Pentagon banned all exports to the Soviet Union.
But Jobs was gone, a centimillionaire with no job. He’d
been given his “fuck-you money” from Apple, he’d been on
the cover of Time, he was a pop-culture icon for
Chrissakes!-what was he going to do now? He pondered a
few options: (1) He thought of asking NASA if he could fly
on one of the space shuttles, maybe as soon as the following
year on the Challenger, (2) he visited the Soviet Union with a
view to selling school computers to Mikhail Gorbachev, (3)
and, perhaps even more fancifully, he considered making a
bid for a Senate seat in California. But then, after a bicycle
trip through Tuscany, he decided to do something far more
prosaic: he’d get together a few engineers and do it all over
again-he’d launch another computer company. He called
his software company NeXT (“the next big thing”) and also
bought a fledgling animation firm from Star Wars director
George Lucas “that needed vision.” That company was
Pixar, these days the digital animation studio behind Toy
Story, Monsters Inc., A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo, and The
Incredibles, films that between them have grossed more than
three billion dollars.
He returned to Apple as “interim CEO” in 1997 at the request
of a board desperate for innovation and, says Jobs, “to
salvage its fortunes.” Given that the company nearly folded
in i995, this isn’t as cocky as it sounds, and Jobs soon made
his mark by cleaning house, streamlining the product lines,
and jumping on the Internet bandwagon. He quickly
launched the brightly colored iMac desktop computers-a
hit with every design-obsessive from Cupertino to
Clerkenwell-and followed them with the PowerBook and
the iBook laptops, the flat-screen iMac (with its fifteen-inch
LCD monitor and G4 processor), the OS X upgrade Panther,
and the PowerMac G5, arguably the fastest desktop
computer on the planet. Jobs also made peace with Microsoft,
adapting many of his operating systems to be compatible
with its Windows product.
Always, Jobs was obsessed with design and presentation,
obsessed with how a product felt and how a product looked,
as much as with how it worked. If there’s anything PC users
should be thankful to Apple for, it’s that their PCs probably
aren’t quite as ugly as they used to be. Jobs brought the computers’
looks to the forefront and made PC manufacturers
step back, take a look at the ugly beige and greige boxes on
their desks, and try to create something a little more scintillating.
As soon as he introduced the five colored iMacs at the
tail end of the 1990s, suddenly all computers, all white
goods, every toaster, vacuum cleaner, and CD player looked
as though they had been sent to the ergonomic doctor (even
Rolex introduced iMac-influenced watches with translucent
plastic in pastel colors). Apple’s design sensibility-which
was driven almost exclusively by Jobs and Jonathan Ive-was
now so much a part of the company’s DNA that unless
each new product line substantially improved upon its predecessor,
it was considered a failure; the Zen-like simplicity
of a product’s functionality only worked in conjunction
with the brutal simplicity of its design. And if the company
didn’t get it right, there was a small army of devotees to tell
it so. The company subscribed to the inverse law that says
supply generates its own demand. If Apple made stuff, people
bought it. Apple had become a cult that rewarded the
loner, a badge of honor you could wear in your own home.
Own an iMac, an iBook, or a PowerMac and you could be
king without even getting dressed. Steve Jobs had not only
steered one of Silicon Valley’s greatest companies to fame
and fortune by creating some of the most sought-after products
of the age, but he had also emancipated a generation of
nerds.
But, successful and as innovative as he was, who could
have known Jobs would take Apple into digital music?
BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 2005
Dylan Jones
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-59691-021-6
Excerpted from iPod, Therefore I Am
by Dylan Jones
Copyright © 2005 by Dylan Jones.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
