Tony Fadell talks about Steve Jobs’ controversial decisions on iPod and iPhone development

Tony Fadell, also known as the father of the iPod, released his new book this week called Build, which tells the story behind his 30 years working in Silicon Valley companies. In an interview with CNBC, Fadell discussed the development stages of the iPod’s and iPhone’s early years and controversial Steve Jobs decisions.

No iPod for Windows users

Fadell was hired by Apple in 2001 to help the company develop its music strategy, which of course involved the iPod. As he mentioned in the interview, there had been multiple MP3 players before the iPod, and they had become quite popular. However, none of them were intuitive for people who “just wanted to play MP3s.”

The idea inside Apple was to bring that experience of MP3 players to the masses. After all, in the engineer’s words, “everyone loves music, the audience is everywhere.” However, unlike its competitors, the iPod had to be easy to use, with good battery life, fast data syncing, and support 1,000 songs.

According to Fadell this is one reason Apple chose FireWire over USB. While the original USB standard was super slow with speeds of up to 12 Mbps, FireWire was already able to transfer over 100 Mbps at the time. This decision was not made without another reason.

As some of you may already know, the first two generations of the iPod weren’t compatible with Windows PCs. To transfer music to the iPod, the user must have a Mac – this was Steve Jobs’ decision.

From day one, I said “We gotta make sure it’s going to work with Windows.” And he [Steve] said “Over my dead body, never.”

A little help from outside

Jobs believed that the iPod would convince Windows users to switch to the Mac. However, the number of users buying Macs because of the iPod was never significant. And of course, this also affected iPod sales as the product became much more expensive for those who didn’t have a Mac at home.

Even so, Steve Jobs opposed the idea that the product could be used with every PC. That’s when Fadell and the iPod team reached out to journalist Walt Mossberg, who was also a friend of Jobs, for help in convincing him to make the iPod compatible with Windows.

Fadell mentioned that Jobs didn’t want to be wrong, but Mossberg helped him see that opening up the iPod for Windows PCs would be the right way to make the product successful – and it turned out that Mossberg and Fadell were right.

Third-party apps on iPhone

It’s not news that Steve Jobs wasn’t in favor of the iPhone running third-party apps when the device was announced in 2007. Developers and corporates had a lot of requests for their apps once the iPhone was released.

Apple came up with the “sweet solution”, which was to encourage web app development that runs through Safari. Interestingly, Fadell revealed in the interview that the web app idea was highly supported by Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO at the time.

Schmidt was on Apple’s board of directors, and he was also heavily involved in the development of the iPhone as it came with multiple Google services built in. Schmidt was “a bit emotional” after seeing web apps run on an iPhone for the first-time.

However, as we know, web apps weren’t that good. Steve Jobs also saw an opportunity to create the App Store to help people “lock in” to the ecosystem.

Wrap up

In the entire interview of one hour, Fadell shared details about his personal and professional life. After leaving Apple in 2008, he founded his own company “Nest Labs” to create smart home devices, which was later acquired by Google.

You can see the video under :

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