9 ms·

A Prototype Original iPod

320 points by samps 5y ago

cogman10 5y ago
Ok, who's going to get one of these and stuff a raspberry pi inside?
- bityard 5y ago
  That would be fun to watch. Whoever does that would rustle _so many_ jimmies.
- peterburkimsher 5y ago
  Did that in January 2013 :-) https://peterburk.github.io/blog/#pipod https://peterburk.github.io/blog/#pipod
etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
Was this used to effectively silo developers from each other? Ie, don’t let the hardware team see the real software UI, and don’t let the software team see the real hardware UI. It looks too ridiculous to be real, I suspect it was ugly by design. Apple did this on the iPhone design, the ugly software UI was called “skankphone”.
- jetrink 5y ago
  My guess is that they used that case from early on in the project and then just stuck with it even as the electronics inside shrunk. It's not like the software people would be fooled by the enormous size; they knew they were making a pocketable music player. Interestingly, the holes for the screen and the buttons look like they were molded, but the holes for the jacks and wheel look like they were milled. I wonder if the boxes were custom-made or something off-the-shelf that happened to have the right screen size and number of buttons.
  - samwillis 5y ago
    It looks like a SLA 3d print to me. They go that distinctive yellow over time.
    - ghostly_s 5y ago
      In 2001?
      - samwillis 5y ago
        Absolutely, was already quite common back then. It was invented in the 80s after all.
        monocasa 5y ago
        Yeah, SLA printing was totes used in prototyping back then. It was just really expensive because the patents hadn't expired yet. I'd expect that Apple's R&D lab would have had access to them.
- siva7 5y ago
  But why? Why silo
  - clint 5y ago
    No leaks
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    So the hardware guys can't leak the software, and the software guys can't leak the hardware.
    - amelius 5y ago
      Funny thing is, Apple claims that they need to integrate everything from hardware to software in order to obtain the best possible user experience. This shows that this is complete nonsense. We could break up Apple into a hardware and software company and little would change in this respect.
      - marcellus23 5y ago
        > This shows that this is complete nonsense. Uh, what? This makes no sense. It's not like the entire hardware and software teams were totally firewalled. Obviously higher ups and managers were in both circles and coordinated the development of both.
        amelius 5y ago
        Yes, so if Apple were divided into separate hardware and software companies, then a third company X could order both these companies to come up with hardware and software solutions, and reach the same result. In this case, what you call management would be performed by the third company. This is imho a better way of building things than having everything completely integrated in a single company. A fourth company could do the same thing as X and build an alternative iPod. And so could a fifth, etc.
        5y ago
- adamgordonbell 5y ago
  It's so cool to see these pictures. It does seem to match David Shayer's description: So they make what Apple calls a stealth case, which is just a big plastic box. So our stealth case was so ugly. It looked like they went into an old Russian medical equipment leftover warehouse and just took some plastic boxes, and stuck it in. It was horrible. They said basically, “ You’re writing the file system for this thing. You don’t need to know what’s on the disc. Just make it work.” They weren't supposed to know what they were working on. To the extent that that was possible. https://corecursive.com/063-apple-2001/#the-first-day https://corecursive.com/063-apple-2001/#the-first-day
  - gwbas1c 5y ago
    I wonder if they thought it was a boombox or a personal stereo?
  - Waterluvian 5y ago
    I get why this is done when something is top secret. But I think there’s no better way to be reduced to a fungible coding cog than “you don’t actually need to understand the big picture. Here’s a spec. Implement it.”
  - robocat 5y ago
    Later down the article is another story: David: So, my guess is they were making some sort of secret Geiger counter and they wanted to be able to take it around and look for, I don’t know, people making dirty bombs maybe? But not have it looked like a Geiger counter. David: if you wanted to go and check if there’s any signs of radiation in some place where you’re not officially supposed to be checking, you’re on a tourist visa in Tehran or something, this would be a very useful device. If you’re arrested with a Geiger counter you’re in trouble, but if someone looks at your iPod and the iPod works and it plays music and it’s totally normal, you’d be much safer, right? Adam:Yeah, totally. So, they built this and then?
bryans 5y ago
To me, this makes it so much more obvious that the only innovation they were even aiming for was a scroll wheel. Everything else is just a Diamond Rio with a hard drive attached. That's not to diminish the effectiveness or novelty of the scroll wheel, but the larger capacity seems to be the only thing that actually mattered here.
- gwbas1c 5y ago
  Syncing music with iTunes was so much easier than the junk sync apps that other players had.
  - bryans 5y ago
    You mean copying and pasting files that already contain metadeta? That was difficult? Because I'm pretty sure everyone universally hated the formats and auto-renamed files that iTunes forced.
    - batmanthehorse 5y ago
      yes everyone hated that. that's why itunes failed and we're still manually copying files to this day.
      - bryans 5y ago
        Sorry, but while Apple did succeed in manhandling the music industry, iTunes has never been a beloved piece of software. It has always been trash and barely worked. So to put it on some kind of pedestal is disingenuous, at best.
        gwbas1c 5y ago
        I loved iTunes. To this day it was my favorite all-in-one player, metadata editor, and syncing tool. (Granted, I don't use it anymore now that streaming services are so awesome. But I miss it like I miss the feeling of buying a CD and listening to it on the way home.)
fudgy 5y ago
Loved the original iPod so much that I‘ve re-created it as an app once the iPhone came out: https://github.com/j-lechner/RetroPod https://github.com/j-lechner/RetroPod Not sure if it still builds, but it was amazing to study and re-build all those little UX details like accelerating scrolling and timeline scrubbing.
- cushychicken 5y ago
  OMG is there a way to make this some kind of skin for Spotify? I, too, loved the iPod UI, and would love to have something like this again.
  - Scottopherson 5y ago
    https://tannerv.com/ipod/ https://tannerv.com/ipod/ ^ Fun website that implements a video ipod UI in the browser. The app integrates with Spotify and Apple Music.
wiremine 5y ago
Although it doesn't cover the iPod, the book "Creative Selection" is a great window into Apple's process (at least at the time) https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37638098-creative-selection https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37638098-creative-sel... It's an easy read and the reads a bit like a technology-focused biography, not a "how to."
leecarraher 5y ago
Is the original poster sure the extra size wasn't to accommodate a 2.5" or 3.5" for testing purposes. There doesn't appear to be a physical HDD. In the 2nd prototype picture (not much for scale) it looks like a board with control logic, and maybe the decoder IC, and MCU, then a connection to a battery and lcd screen with it's controller circuit. I don't see an HDD, and solid state drives with capacity corresponding to the original ipod weren't on the market yet.
pipeline_peak 5y ago
I’d like to know more about when Apple started working on the iPod. Especially given how crude this prototype was and the obvious amount of room for design revisions until the 2001 release.
tambourine_man 5y ago
> We don’t know much about where it came from. That’s the most important part! How did Panic got it? Why did they had to wait 20 years? Some trade secret deal expired?
- egypturnash 5y ago
  It might have something to do with the time they almost ended up selling their MP3 player Audion to Apple and turning it into iTunes. (I would link to their story about that but it seems to have not made the transition from a standalone page on their site to their blog.)
  - maguay 5y ago
    Looks like this might be the original story: https://panic.com/extras/audionstory/ https://panic.com/extras/audionstory/
happytoexplain 5y ago
>As you can see, it’s… quite large! In fact, I can not! The photo in question has no reference objects. (scroll down to see photos that actually demonstrate its size)
- electroly 5y ago
  Two references in all of the photos are the JTAG connector on the side (a standard pin header with 0.1" spacing) and the standard headphone jack.
  - tantalor 5y ago
    Those are poor/obscure references.
  - happytoexplain 5y ago
    Yes, but that's not useful if you don't know that one is a headphone jack (from the side), or that the other is a JTAG connector, or you do know but don't know what sizes JTAG connectors come in. And even allowing for all that, visual size analogies provide very poor information when the common element is relatively small in both cases.
    - electroly 5y ago
      The article mentions it, that's the only reason I knew it was JTAG. I agree -- a banana for scale would have been appropriate here.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - peterburkimsher 5y ago
    I'd be very interested to know where the JTAG connector is routed to on the other side... iPodLinux and Rockbox never did figure out some features, and to finally have a real dev kit means that we might finish it! Actually I was just using my iPod 5.5G with Rockbox on 2021-10-05, doing a demo of iPod clickwheel -> USB -> Mac -> Arduino -> Rotary encoder -> (commercial product) I wanted to use my old iPod 1G too, but serial-over-FireWire is a little complicated to set up. Repairing iPods is what got me into embedded systems engineering in the first place! From a cassette player (age 9) to a 32 MB Rio 600 (age 10) to a MiniDisc player (age 11) to a 1st gen iPod (age 12, Feb 2002), then 3rd gen iPod (age 13, Sep 2003). After that, I was repairing friends' iPods, moderating the iPodLinux forum, reading the Bible as Notes, or Shakespeare for English class... good memories. And I still use an iPod now! With an SSD, and adaptors stashed in the back. https://www.flickr.com/photos/150180606@N08/49613276321/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/150180606@N08/49613276321/
macNchz 5y ago
Hard to believe it has been 20 years. When talking about the impact of the original iPod on the last two decades of Apple's extraordinary success, I like to jump back to this forum thread from October 23rd 2001 (it is always easy to find because it is thread number 500!) and see the reactions from the time: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.500/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...
- MBCook 5y ago
  It became so popular, especially after it was officially available on Windows in 2003. And it remained THE thing until the iPhone really exploded when unleashed from AT&T around 2011. It’s heyday was only about 8 years but it had such a MASSIVE effect on the technology and music industries. Has any other product been so important but only been around for a relatively short amount of time?
  - tantalor 5y ago
    Daguerreotypes were only used for a brief period in 1840s and 1850s but had huge impact on development of photography. Edit: check out the video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbbH77rYaa8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbbH77rYaa8
    - MBCook 5y ago
      That’s a great example.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    the iPhone really exploded when unleashed from AT&T around 2011. Cingular.
    - xxpor 5y ago
      Cingular was renamed to AT&T in 2006.
broabprobe 5y ago
love https://xn--n3h.net/ https://xn--n3h.net/ though AFAIK https://unicodesnowmanforyou.com/ https://unicodesnowmanforyou.com/ predates it
pleb_nz 5y ago
Imagine the battery life if you filled that case with battery.
mbar84 5y ago
I hope Apple will make a 25th anniversary edition of the iPod, with modern connectors and internals but a physically clicky wheel like the original.
- rashkov 5y ago
  I was going through my things this weekend and I found an old iPod and one of those speakers with an integrated iPod holder. Was about to try and give the speaker away, but instead I set it up, put it on shuffle, and it’s delightful. Like a time capsule jukebox. Feels somehow nicer to have an independent device doing its thing in the corner of the room, rather than streaming from my phone.
  - teeray 5y ago
    It drives me nuts that we have orders of magnitude more storage in our pockets now, yet many user experiences encourage streaming everything. Sure, unlimited plans ameliorate the costs of streaming, but why introduce all that complexity when you have unused storage sitting right there.
    - anaganisk 5y ago
      How else can corporates extract money for every-time you play your favourite song? You don’t own music when you stream.

320 points by samps 5y ago

cogman10 5y ago

Ok, who's going to get one of these and stuff a raspberry pi inside?

bityard 5y ago
That would be fun to watch. Whoever does that would rustle _so many_ jimmies.
peterburkimsher 5y ago
Did that in January 2013 :-) https://peterburk.github.io/blog/#pipod https://peterburk.github.io/blog/#pipod

etaioinshrdlu 5y ago

Was this used to effectively silo developers from each other? Ie, don’t let the hardware team see the real software UI, and don’t let the software team see the real hardware UI. It looks too ridiculous to be real, I suspect it was ugly by design. Apple did this on the iPhone design, the ugly software UI was called “skankphone”.

jetrink 5y ago
My guess is that they used that case from early on in the project and then just stuck with it even as the electronics inside shrunk. It's not like the software people would be fooled by the enormous size; they knew they were making a pocketable music player. Interestingly, the holes for the screen and the buttons look like they were molded, but the holes for the jacks and wheel look like they were milled. I wonder if the boxes were custom-made or something off-the-shelf that happened to have the right screen size and number of buttons.
- samwillis 5y ago
  It looks like a SLA 3d print to me. They go that distinctive yellow over time.
  - ghostly_s 5y ago
    In 2001?
    - samwillis 5y ago
      Absolutely, was already quite common back then. It was invented in the 80s after all.
      - monocasa 5y ago
        Yeah, SLA printing was totes used in prototyping back then. It was just really expensive because the patents hadn't expired yet. I'd expect that Apple's R&D lab would have had access to them.
siva7 5y ago
But why? Why silo
- clint 5y ago
  No leaks
- marcellus23 5y ago
  So the hardware guys can't leak the software, and the software guys can't leak the hardware.
  - amelius 5y ago
    Funny thing is, Apple claims that they need to integrate everything from hardware to software in order to obtain the best possible user experience. This shows that this is complete nonsense. We could break up Apple into a hardware and software company and little would change in this respect.
    - marcellus23 5y ago
      > This shows that this is complete nonsense. Uh, what? This makes no sense. It's not like the entire hardware and software teams were totally firewalled. Obviously higher ups and managers were in both circles and coordinated the development of both.
      - amelius 5y ago
        Yes, so if Apple were divided into separate hardware and software companies, then a third company X could order both these companies to come up with hardware and software solutions, and reach the same result. In this case, what you call management would be performed by the third company. This is imho a better way of building things than having everything completely integrated in a single company. A fourth company could do the same thing as X and build an alternative iPod. And so could a fifth, etc.
        5y ago
adamgordonbell 5y ago
It's so cool to see these pictures. It does seem to match David Shayer's description: So they make what Apple calls a stealth case, which is just a big plastic box. So our stealth case was so ugly. It looked like they went into an old Russian medical equipment leftover warehouse and just took some plastic boxes, and stuck it in. It was horrible. They said basically, “ You’re writing the file system for this thing. You don’t need to know what’s on the disc. Just make it work.” They weren't supposed to know what they were working on. To the extent that that was possible. https://corecursive.com/063-apple-2001/#the-first-day https://corecursive.com/063-apple-2001/#the-first-day
- gwbas1c 5y ago
  I wonder if they thought it was a boombox or a personal stereo?
- Waterluvian 5y ago
  I get why this is done when something is top secret. But I think there’s no better way to be reduced to a fungible coding cog than “you don’t actually need to understand the big picture. Here’s a spec. Implement it.”
- robocat 5y ago
  Later down the article is another story: David: So, my guess is they were making some sort of secret Geiger counter and they wanted to be able to take it around and look for, I don’t know, people making dirty bombs maybe? But not have it looked like a Geiger counter. David: if you wanted to go and check if there’s any signs of radiation in some place where you’re not officially supposed to be checking, you’re on a tourist visa in Tehran or something, this would be a very useful device. If you’re arrested with a Geiger counter you’re in trouble, but if someone looks at your iPod and the iPod works and it plays music and it’s totally normal, you’d be much safer, right? Adam:Yeah, totally. So, they built this and then?

bryans 5y ago

To me, this makes it so much more obvious that the only innovation they were even aiming for was a scroll wheel. Everything else is just a Diamond Rio with a hard drive attached. That's not to diminish the effectiveness or novelty of the scroll wheel, but the larger capacity seems to be the only thing that actually mattered here.

gwbas1c 5y ago
Syncing music with iTunes was so much easier than the junk sync apps that other players had.
- bryans 5y ago
  You mean copying and pasting files that already contain metadeta? That was difficult? Because I'm pretty sure everyone universally hated the formats and auto-renamed files that iTunes forced.
  - batmanthehorse 5y ago
    yes everyone hated that. that's why itunes failed and we're still manually copying files to this day.
    - bryans 5y ago
      Sorry, but while Apple did succeed in manhandling the music industry, iTunes has never been a beloved piece of software. It has always been trash and barely worked. So to put it on some kind of pedestal is disingenuous, at best.
      - gwbas1c 5y ago
        I loved iTunes. To this day it was my favorite all-in-one player, metadata editor, and syncing tool. (Granted, I don't use it anymore now that streaming services are so awesome. But I miss it like I miss the feeling of buying a CD and listening to it on the way home.)

fudgy 5y ago

Loved the original iPod so much that I‘ve re-created it as an app once the iPhone came out: https://github.com/j-lechner/RetroPod https://github.com/j-lechner/RetroPod Not sure if it still builds, but it was amazing to study and re-build all those little UX details like accelerating scrolling and timeline scrubbing.

cushychicken 5y ago
OMG is there a way to make this some kind of skin for Spotify? I, too, loved the iPod UI, and would love to have something like this again.
- Scottopherson 5y ago
  https://tannerv.com/ipod/ https://tannerv.com/ipod/ ^ Fun website that implements a video ipod UI in the browser. The app integrates with Spotify and Apple Music.

wiremine 5y ago

Although it doesn't cover the iPod, the book "Creative Selection" is a great window into Apple's process (at least at the time) https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37638098-creative-selection https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37638098-creative-sel... It's an easy read and the reads a bit like a technology-focused biography, not a "how to."

leecarraher 5y ago

Is the original poster sure the extra size wasn't to accommodate a 2.5" or 3.5" for testing purposes. There doesn't appear to be a physical HDD. In the 2nd prototype picture (not much for scale) it looks like a board with control logic, and maybe the decoder IC, and MCU, then a connection to a battery and lcd screen with it's controller circuit. I don't see an HDD, and solid state drives with capacity corresponding to the original ipod weren't on the market yet.

pipeline_peak 5y ago

I’d like to know more about when Apple started working on the iPod. Especially given how crude this prototype was and the obvious amount of room for design revisions until the 2001 release.

tambourine_man 5y ago

> We don’t know much about where it came from. That’s the most important part! How did Panic got it? Why did they had to wait 20 years? Some trade secret deal expired?

egypturnash 5y ago
It might have something to do with the time they almost ended up selling their MP3 player Audion to Apple and turning it into iTunes. (I would link to their story about that but it seems to have not made the transition from a standalone page on their site to their blog.)
- maguay 5y ago
  Looks like this might be the original story: https://panic.com/extras/audionstory/ https://panic.com/extras/audionstory/

happytoexplain 5y ago

>As you can see, it’s… quite large! In fact, I can not! The photo in question has no reference objects. (scroll down to see photos that actually demonstrate its size)

electroly 5y ago
Two references in all of the photos are the JTAG connector on the side (a standard pin header with 0.1" spacing) and the standard headphone jack.
- tantalor 5y ago
  Those are poor/obscure references.
- happytoexplain 5y ago
  Yes, but that's not useful if you don't know that one is a headphone jack (from the side), or that the other is a JTAG connector, or you do know but don't know what sizes JTAG connectors come in. And even allowing for all that, visual size analogies provide very poor information when the common element is relatively small in both cases.
  - electroly 5y ago
    The article mentions it, that's the only reason I knew it was JTAG. I agree -- a banana for scale would have been appropriate here.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- peterburkimsher 5y ago
  I'd be very interested to know where the JTAG connector is routed to on the other side... iPodLinux and Rockbox never did figure out some features, and to finally have a real dev kit means that we might finish it! Actually I was just using my iPod 5.5G with Rockbox on 2021-10-05, doing a demo of iPod clickwheel -> USB -> Mac -> Arduino -> Rotary encoder -> (commercial product) I wanted to use my old iPod 1G too, but serial-over-FireWire is a little complicated to set up. Repairing iPods is what got me into embedded systems engineering in the first place! From a cassette player (age 9) to a 32 MB Rio 600 (age 10) to a MiniDisc player (age 11) to a 1st gen iPod (age 12, Feb 2002), then 3rd gen iPod (age 13, Sep 2003). After that, I was repairing friends' iPods, moderating the iPodLinux forum, reading the Bible as Notes, or Shakespeare for English class... good memories. And I still use an iPod now! With an SSD, and adaptors stashed in the back. https://www.flickr.com/photos/150180606@N08/49613276321/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/150180606@N08/49613276321/

macNchz 5y ago

Hard to believe it has been 20 years. When talking about the impact of the original iPod on the last two decades of Apple's extraordinary success, I like to jump back to this forum thread from October 23rd 2001 (it is always easy to find because it is thread number 500!) and see the reactions from the time: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.500/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...

MBCook 5y ago
It became so popular, especially after it was officially available on Windows in 2003. And it remained THE thing until the iPhone really exploded when unleashed from AT&T around 2011. It’s heyday was only about 8 years but it had such a MASSIVE effect on the technology and music industries. Has any other product been so important but only been around for a relatively short amount of time?
- tantalor 5y ago
  Daguerreotypes were only used for a brief period in 1840s and 1850s but had huge impact on development of photography. Edit: check out the video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbbH77rYaa8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbbH77rYaa8
  - MBCook 5y ago
    That’s a great example.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  the iPhone really exploded when unleashed from AT&T around 2011. Cingular.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    Cingular was renamed to AT&T in 2006.

broabprobe 5y ago

love https://xn--n3h.net/ https://xn--n3h.net/ though AFAIK https://unicodesnowmanforyou.com/ https://unicodesnowmanforyou.com/ predates it

pleb_nz 5y ago

Imagine the battery life if you filled that case with battery.

mbar84 5y ago

I hope Apple will make a 25th anniversary edition of the iPod, with modern connectors and internals but a physically clicky wheel like the original.

rashkov 5y ago
I was going through my things this weekend and I found an old iPod and one of those speakers with an integrated iPod holder. Was about to try and give the speaker away, but instead I set it up, put it on shuffle, and it’s delightful. Like a time capsule jukebox. Feels somehow nicer to have an independent device doing its thing in the corner of the room, rather than streaming from my phone.
- teeray 5y ago
  It drives me nuts that we have orders of magnitude more storage in our pockets now, yet many user experiences encourage streaming everything. Sure, unlimited plans ameliorate the costs of streaming, but why introduce all that complexity when you have unused storage sitting right there.
  - anaganisk 5y ago
    How else can corporates extract money for every-time you play your favourite song? You don’t own music when you stream.