Saturday was the 20th anniversary of the original iPod. Tony Fadell was a consultant hired by Apple to come up with some music player prototypes, presenting them to Steve Jobs. In the linked interview, Fadell talks about the experience with CNET’s Roger Cheng.

A few highlights:

When presenting the models, Fadell did as Ng coached, showing off the worst model first, then the second and, finally, his favorite as the last option.

Jobs seized on it immediately.

“Steve picked it up and he’s like, ‘we’re building this and you’re now going to join us to build it,’ and I was like ‘whoa whoa,'” Fadell said.

And:

After a few weeks of negotiations with Jobs, Fadell joined Apple in April 2001 and assembled a team made up of Fuse and General Magic employees to put together what would become the iPod. The project immediately faced an uphill challenge. The team needed to work with a lot of new components, including a brand new hard drive from Toshiba that Rubinstein, who oversaw the whole project, identified as the key ingredient for the iPod.

Other breakthroughs included new software for the user interface and a then-new kind of lithium ion pack, giving the device 10 hours of battery life that far exceeded anything else in the market.

Amazing that Fadell joined Apple in April and had a shipping product 5 months later. Mind boggling.

Fadell’s team worked with the industrial design group, led by famed Apple designer Jony Ive, to finalize the look of the iPod. Because the next wave of Macs would embrace white and clear plastic, Apple took the same design language and applied it to the iPod.

Along the way, Fadell saw two other projects at Apple scrapped, which fueled him to move even faster to finish (he wouldn’t comment on what those projects were). Then came the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, freezing the nation even as he had to rally the team in that final stretch. “It was absolutely nuts.”

And:

When Jobs unveiled the iPod at an Oct. 23 Apple event at its Town Hall amphitheater in Cupertino, California, the device wasn’t technically done, according to Fadell. The software wasn’t finished, and the company hadn’t signed off on the manufacturing plan. But Jobs gave that pre-1.0 version out to the media in attendance, along with the 20 CDs containing the music that was preloaded on the device.

Imagine releasing a new product in the aftermath of 9/11. Amazing that the announcement didn’t get lost in the shuffle. The chaos of 9/11 was front and center in everyone’s mind at that time. But the iPod was revolutionary, and that was not lost on the Apple faithful. An invention that changed Apple’s fortunes.