How Apple ‘invented’ the iPod
Amazing ideas for music on the go, and the wrath of Jobs
iTunes was the killer app for the iPod; it made organising and transferring your music completely effortless.
While music fans were mad for MP3, tech firms and the music industry were achingly slow to react
You can start a musical revolution with three chords, or three words. Words like ‘rip’, ‘mix’ and ‘burn’. That was the slogan Apple coined in 2001 as part of a new strategy: make the Mac a digital hub for absolutely everything. And at the heart of that hub was a new app called iTunes, which enabled you to rip music to your Mac and burn it to CD.
Apple didn’t invent iTunes. Former Apple engineers Bill Kincaid, Jeff Robbin and Dave Heller did, and they called it SoundJam. It was designed to play MP3 music files on Macs, and Steve Jobs liked it so much he acquired the rights to it and hired Jeff Robbin to develop it into an Apple application.