Panic blog:

The iPod was one of the first times Apple showed up and did what we now think of as their standard move — they made The Apple Version®.

Great point. There were lots of other MP3 players out there. Apple took the concept, modernized and improved on the traditional components, then ran it through the Jony Ive design process. They Apple-ized it.

Now, there are a lot of mysteries in the Panic Archives (it’s a closet) but by far one of the most mysterious is what you’re seeing for the first time today: an original early iPod prototype.

We don’t know much about where it came from. But we’ve been waiting 20 years to share it with you.

Fantastic set of images. In that first pic, the tiny screen in the upper right corner of the giant box is the screen of the iPod prototype.

The prototype itself is shown in the third image. It has a date of September 3rd, 2001. That’s about 6 weeks before Steve’s iPod town hall keynote, and 8 days before 9/11.

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.

iFixit:

Inside we found some surprising display technology that was probably a huge pain to manufacture at scale, likely causing a cascade of delays. When Apple finally unveiled it last month, the watch had no firm release date, a red flag that usually signals production trouble. (If you’re wondering how a bunch of ex-Apple engineers occupy their time nowadays, read on—this is exactly the kind of expensive manufacturing snafu they’ve banded together to solve.)

Follow the headline link for an interesting read, or just watch the teardown below. Both are full of closeup images and insights. My kind of fun.

Apple:

“Dr. Brain” stars LEE Sun-kyun, best known to global audiences for his supporting role in the Academy Award-winning film “Parasite.” The series also stars LEE You-young, PARK Hee-soon, SEO Ji-hye and LEE Jae-won.

Have you seen Parasite, the Korean language thriller that won the 2020 best picture Oscar? It’s excellent, available to watch free on Hulu, a few other streaming services.

As you can see by the trailer, Dr. Brain continues Apple’s SciFi push. The series premiers a week from Thursday, on November 4th. Looks right up my alley.