The Cupertino brand’s season of facts has recently taken a new turn. A much-anticipated book “After Steve: how Apple became a multi-billion dollar company and lost its soul” was released this week The book reveals a number of surprises, one of which is why Jony Ive, Apple’s legendary chief designer, left the company during Steve’s mistake. Let’s get going.
Tony Fadell was recruited by Apple in 2001 to help the company establish its music strategy. This was just around the time when the iPod and iTunes were launched, as well as the first MP3 players. Apple intends to communicate its vision to this market with a simple-to-use device, long battery life, rapid data syncing, and the potential to hold 1000 songs.
The choice to use the FireWire protocol instead of a USB on the iPod was the initial point of contention. In comparison to 1000 Mbps, the USB standard only allowed for data transfer rates of 12 Mbps. The current USB 4 standard, on the other hand, can carry data at speeds of up to 40 Gbps.
Unfortunately, the original two iPod units were only compatible with Macs. Windows users have no option but to use a Mac to transfer music to an iPod. Tony Fadell was so opposed to the idea that he called Steve Jobs’ friend, journalist Walt Mossberg, to try to convince the Apple founder. It took a few years for Windows to have iTunes and iPod compatibility.
Another controversial Steve Jobs decision mentioned by Tony Fadell in the interview is the iPhone’s openness to third-party apps. On the first iPhone, there was no App Store, and the initial iPhone OS installation only came with preloaded programs. Third-party applications, on the other hand, could have been installed on Windows Mobile or Symbian at the time.
Instead, for the first versions of the iPhone OS, Apple chose to create online applications that operated via Safari. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO and a member of Apple’s Board of Directors, was the driving force behind this. He was especially keen for Google to reap the benefits of the iPhone ecosystem. Google’s default search engine, as well as Google Maps and YouTube, were already loaded on the iPhone.
