6 EOTO 1 Tech Timeline

For the first EOTO, I chose to do my presentation on the first iPod and how it was created.  The presentation went well, however I wish I had remembered a little bit more from my initial research session, I had found some good articles I was not able to find again when I was finishing up the slides but hindsight is 20/20 so here we are!

The original iPod

The iPod and its' launch time was actually a miracle.  They released this thing 6 months after coming up with the initial design, which is lightyear speed for product development.  They were essentially attempting to reinvent the wheel as mp3 players were already running rampant but none had the features the iPod did.  Apple really took their product development to the next level, starting with creating their own cable to allow for faster transfer speeds as most cables at that time could not transfer the bulky songs in a moderate amount of time.  They came up with the Firewire cable, which has since then become obsolete because technology has improved so drastically.  The Firewire cable was just one of the features that allowed for the iPod to take the world by storm.  The second, and probably, biggest feature(s) that held the iPod head and shoulders above the competition was the combination of an ingenious  User Interface, as well as a Scroll wheel, which had never been seen on a device before.  This allowed the user to scroll through many songs quickly as competitors just had buttons that you had to press an exuberant amount of times to get to the song/album you wanted to go to.  The secondary goal of the iPod was to bring people to the mac platform to start inching away at the windows computer market.  This was not initially totally successful but it was a stepping stone towards the bigger picture goal.  The first iPod also had a great battery life for its' time, great storage at 5 gigabytes and finally the most appealing aspect was its' form/color.  Most mp3 players on the market at the time were black or gray, Steve Jobs wanted the iPod to stand out so he made it white and silver which brought an "oos" and "aaahs' factor to it.  All of these factors together in one product made the iPod the single most successful mp3 player in history