A thousand songs in your pocket: iPod

In 2000, the music player market is dominated by a few companies.

First and foremost is Diamond Multimedia, which Apple knows through its TrackStar product, a PC card that allows Apple II emulation. This is a long-healed but not forgotten wound. Diamond specializes in the production of graphics cards, and in 1999, it was taken over by another company specializing in multimedia cards, S3, as part of a long-term partnership.

Image: RIO PMP300

Caption: Diamond Multimedia RIO PMP300 – one of the first MP3 players. Are you wondering why it didn’t catch on against the iPod?

Diamond offers what are probably the best-selling MP3 players equipped with flash memory, sold under the Rio brand name. The first Rio PMP300 player was launched in September 1998 and came with 32MB of memory and a SmartMedia card slot. The device weighs a reasonable 70 grams and measures 9 x 6.4 x 1.6 cm, which is literally miniaturization compared to CD players. A pair of AA batteries powered it for about 8 hours, and data was transferred via a modified parallel port, which was mainly used to connect printers at the time. This, together with the supplied software, meant a practical limitation to the Windows platform, as there was no official support for other systems. The retail price was set at $200. It wasn’t the very first MP3 player, but it was one of the first and definitely the first to receive widespread public response, including angry complaints from RIAA representatives, who claimed that it was designed for nothing more than playing stolen songs and unsuccessfully sued Diamond in October 1998 in a US court. A total of over 200,000 Rio PMP300 players have been sold.

A year later, the Rio 500 model was launched. It is equipped with 64 MB of flash memory, weighs slightly more at 98 grams, and, most importantly, adds USB port support, which is interesting mainly because at that time, the mini-B port specification for USB 1.1, which the new Rio wants to use, is not yet complete, so it comes to market with swapped pins. It was for this model that the trio of Kincaid, Robin, and Heller decided to create their SoundJam program, which would allow the Rio to be filled with music and then conveniently played on a Mac.

The Rio 500 is originally scheduled to hit the market in August 1999 at the latest, and Diamond is also preparing to launch the first digital platform for music sales, which it has named RioPort. The idea is simple: users will buy digital music for their new Rio 500, and Rio will defend itself against the RIAA, an association of music publishers, claiming that it is just a device for listening to stolen music. However, the Rio 500 is delayed due to problems with the miniUSB port and does not hit the market until October 1999. The main attraction of RioPort for music publishers is its support for InterTrust DRM digital music security, and Forrester Research proudly estimates that $1.1 billion worth of digital music will be sold in 2003. In November 1999, Microsoft, not wanting to be left behind in the digital music market, joins the fray and adds its Windows Media system with DRM.

Image: Creative_Nomad_Jukebox_(DAP)

Caption: The Creative Nomad Jukebox with 6GB of disk memory went into production in 2000 and cost $500.

The second contender for the title of successful MP3 player is Creative Labs, manufacturer of the legendary SoundBlaster sound cards, which launched its Nomad player in June 1999. In reality, however, it was a redesigned Korean Samsung Yepp player with 64 MB of memory on a SmartMedia card and connected via a parallel port. Priced at $300, it added an FM player and the ability to record audio in WAV format compared to the Rio model. Soon after, the Nomad II version with a USB interface was released, followed in 2000 by the Nomad Jukebox with a price tag of $500 and a 6GB hard drive.

Image: RCA-Lyra

Caption: The original RCA Lyra from 1999 is now a rare item.

The third player in the group, which was later forgotten the most, was the RCA Lyra, owned by the Thompson consortium. It was launched in the fall of 1999 and its main feature was the use of a CompactFlash slot, which meant that with an external CompactFlash (CF) card reader, you could transfer music to the Lyra almost instantly and conveniently, without the need for special software. However, CF readers were not very widespread at the time. Keep in mind that USB was just getting started, so readers were often built into the PCMCIA slot of a laptop. Priced at $220, the Lyra came with a 64MB CF card.

It is worth noting that none of the manufacturers were leading companies in audio technology; rather, they were manufacturers of computer components who considered MP3 players to be an interesting and relatively simple product to manufacture, which could attract users to their brand and allow them to test a promising market segment with a low barrier to entry. However, the speed at which this market grew surprised everyone. Let’s not forget that the very first commercially available flash MP3 player, the Eiger Labs MPMan F10, was unveiled at CeBIT in March 1998 as a prototype, and it was only because it received so much attention and media coverage that it went on sale just two months after its unveiling. It is said that the head of SaeHan IS (owner of the Eiger Labs brand) was still working out production capacities at the exhibition center. The MPMan succumbed to the Rio player precisely because of its user-unfriendliness and, somewhat surprisingly, because the RIAA did not sue it. It was the legal battle between the unpopular RIAA and Diamond Multimedia that made the Rio brand famous, as every twist and turn in the case, along with the brand name, filled the pages of business and IT publications. Why didn’t the RIAA sue the Korean company SaeHan, which launched the first MP3 player? There could be several reasons, primarily that SaeHan is a huge Korean conglomerate (of which SaeHan IS is a part) with enormous financial resources. And then there is Diamond Multimedia, a California-based company that is easier to sue. Somewhat surprisingly, the legal wrangling elevated Diamond Rio, not MPMan, to the status of “founder of MP3 players,” even though MPMan had introduced several other models before discontinuing production of MP3 players under its own brand.

The year 2000 is expected to be the year when Asian companies enter the MP3 player market. First and foremost, Sony is expected to make its mark, having “institutionalized personal portable music” in the 1970s with its cassette Walkman and later its CD DiscMan. Asia is in the best position, as the all-powerful RIAA/IFPI tandem representing music and film industry publishers in the US does not reach here, and technical innovations are happening fastest here.

And let’s add the final piece to the mosaic. MP3 players equipped with hard drives. Of course, someone thought of that. The rapidly growing demand for notebooks is forcing hard drive manufacturers to miniaturize, and it is not yet clear where the desire for miniaturization will stop, resulting in truly tiny hard drives, but at that time with capacities that are impractical for notebooks. They are not going into mass production because what to do with them, unless their capacity can be increased to ten gigabytes, which is sufficient to run Windows, or another use can be found for them.

Technicians at the DEC Systems research center came up with this sinful idea after visiting CeBit in March, where they saw a prototype of MPMan. Surely, why use expensive and small flash memory when they have plenty of experience with hard drives for mobile devices? And so, in May 1998, they built a prototype MP3 player equipped with a 4.86GB hard drive. The device can hold an amazing thousand songs, or a hundred audio CDs, and has again received extremely positive reviews from IT media experts, with one reservation. It is perhaps a bit heavy (300 grams with batteries), large, and difficult to operate. But, as reviewers point out, it is one of the few devices that can hold your entire music library, transfer data via USB 1.1, and, thanks to its music cache technology, can handle playback interruptions caused by vibrations, such as those that occur when running. Engineers have built a buffer into the device that can load up to ten minutes of music in advance, and they have set the player to store the entire song being played and as much of the next song in the queue as possible in the buffer.

However, the player does not have it easy. Although it is an interesting concept, DEC is absorbed by Compaq, which does not want to get involved in MP3, as it is outside its area of interest and it is under pressure from the RIAA. Instead, it sells the entire reference solution to the Korean company HanGo (renamed Remote Solutions in 2002), which launches the hard disk MP3 player at the end of 1999 under the name PJB-100 at a price of $750. The name was supposed to stand for Personal JukeBox, which could hold 100 audio CDs with 45 minutes of music each, but the name was not changed later, even when the hard drive size was increased to 20GB, as it was already an established name.

Image: PJB

Caption: The Personal Jukebox was neither the smallest nor the easiest to use, but the iPod learned a lot from it.

The Personal Jukebox later served as a significant inspiration in many ways for the design of the first iPod.

Apple is not entering uncharted territory. There are already a number of successful MP3 players and interesting solutions from which lessons can be learned. Although the company’s later legend settled on the idea that the iPod was a bolt from the blue, this is far from the truth. Apple built on the work of its predecessors, which in the case of Creative Labs led to a court case.

Steve Jobs focused on his own MP3 player in the fall of 2000, at a time when he already knew how dire the company’s financial results would be and how much the neglect of digital music had affected them. Aware that Apple needs its next big success to catapult it beyond the boundaries of what ordinary computer box assemblers were doing at the time, Jobs is willing to venture where big companies don’t: into the design of its own MP3 player with built-in memory.

But first, together with Phil Schiller and Jon Rubinstein, they analyze how their competitors are doing. It turns out that the average operating time is around eight to ten hours at most. Thanks to its energy-saving mode, which turns off the hard drive while music stored in the cache is being played, the PJB-100 is able to approach the ten-hour mark. And so Jobs sets ten hours of music playback as the minimum that cannot be exceeded.

At the time, MP3 player manufacturers pointed out that 64MB of memory was enough to store an hour’s worth of music, which was enough for a typical jog or workout at the gym. However, closer examination shows that it’s not that simple. Users may be satisfied with 64MB of music, but they don’t know what 64MB it will be—they want to choose music according to their current mood, not according to what they have recorded on their player, when changing it is too complicated and time-consuming. Filling the 64MB memory of an MP3 player takes several tens of minutes to update, and a USB port, let alone an old parallel port, is not particularly fast. And users don’t like that. With a cassette player, all you have to do is change the cassette. The memory needs to be large enough for the user to store several—or rather dozens—of albums so that they can choose from them according to their taste. This clearly ruled out players equipped with flash memory and made players equipped with miniature hard drives interesting. This brings the PJB-100 to the forefront, which, even in its first version, solves a number of problems that Apple has also identified.

First and foremost, the recording medium itself. The PJB-100 uses a 2.5-inch hard drive from Toshiba, a standard product designed for laptops at the time. However, Apple would like to see an even smaller and lighter drive, as one of the biggest criticisms of hard drive players is their size and weight.

At a meeting with Rubinstein in February 2001, Toshiba representatives show him a prototype of their new drive, which is 1.8 inches in size and has a capacity of 5GB. Rubinstein immediately realizes that he has found what Apple needs for its new player. But there was a small catch. Toshiba had no use for such a small drive itself and did not want to put it into production without the prospect of large orders. So, at Jobs’s direct urging, Rubinstein signed an agreement giving Apple access to the entire production capacity for these drives and Toshiba a $10 million advance in return. Apple thus uses its raw financial power to initiate the production of components that would otherwise come to market much later and at higher prices. Apple will increasingly leverage this technological and price exclusivity in the future.

At this point, however, Apple still needed something: the hardware solution itself and the operating system to power the new device. It also needs a coordinator for the entire development process. In February 2001, this role is taken on by Anthony Fadell, a man who had previously attempted to launch an MP3 player under the banner of General Magic (an Apple spin-off focused on the development of a personal intelligent assistant) and later at Philips. He also tried to approach Sony and RealNetworks with his proposal, and at that moment he was probably the only person on the market with significant experience with MP3 players, but he lacked the capacity to implement it, and Apple had contacts and references for him through General Magic. His involvement gave the development of the iPod a roof over its head and significantly accelerated it, but later caused problems of competence when Fadell argued with Rubinstein over who was responsible for the iPod, until the dispute escalated into a battle of egos over which of them was the father of the iPod.

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A thousand songs in your pocket: iPod

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