iPod

"Steve Jobs held a comparatively low-key event for the launch. The live audience didn’t seem to get it, and Apple got blasted for the $499 price point. More effective was a seven-minute marketing video set to pop music and featuring artists Seal, Moby, and Smash Mouth lusting after the device. “I might have to steal your prototype,” says Moby. “I don’t know who your product’s designers are, but boy, you’re not paying them enough.” In the holiday quarter Apple shipped 125,000 devices, a solid start. But a few months into 2002, sales petered out to just 20,000 a month. Cupertino worried the device was a bit of a dud. “The business was on the teetering edge,” says an engineer who worked on several generations of the iPod. “We had a few months’ sales where it was like, ‘Oh my god, should we even continue this business?’ And ‘Will this survive?’ ” Fadell, exhausted and frustrated, even tried to quit. Jobs persuaded him to stay, elevating his position to overseeing both hardware and software for the iPod. But there were conversations at a high level that if sales didn’t improve, the device wouldn’t be renewed. “We just kept our heads down and kept working on making the product better, better, better,” an iPod engineer says. “We were pretty worried about [the low sales] from an overall business standpoint.” The second-generation iPod came out in August 2002, just nine months after the original. But that unit didn’t sell in impressive numbers either. The underwhelming figures contributed to that year’s profit warning, its third in just four years."

"Tupman had no honeymoon period, no welcome, no introduction to Apple systems. But Fadell sent him schematics for the circuit board before he departed from Heathrow. During the twelve-hour flight, he made his mark spotting problems with the circuit diagrams—how the chips connect together and the resistors pass through the printed circuit layout. He knew this flight from his five years at Psion, which had also partnered with Inventec. The engineers did a double take when he walked in. They all knew him, and together, they got to work immediately on the problems he’d spotted. Then he got to hold a prototype iPod for the first time and immediately knew he’d made the right choice to join Apple. “It was like, ‘This is so cool!’ ” he says."

"Steve officially returned to being Apple’s CEO in 2000 and created a big boom with the portable music player “iPod” in 2001. By the time Keigetsu opened in 2004, he should have already been “the world’s most attention-grabbing executive,” but actually, apart from the birthday party, there weren’t many memorable events from this time."