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Products: USB

It will be a player, not a camera.

However, at the turn of the millennium, digital cameras and camcorders were experiencing a boom. Everyone was manufacturing and selling them, margins were being pushed down, and Jobs realized that he would not be able to generate significant profits for the company in this market. On the other hand, the market for digital music players was not yet in this state. It is already clear that customer preferences are shifting away from CDs, minidiscs, and especially cassettes, but the battle is not yet over. The first MP3 players are appearing, but they have a number of significant weaknesses and disadvantages. At the turn of the millennium, the most widespread MP3 players are Discman CD players, which can play not only regular audio CDs but also CDs with burned music. Their advantage at the time is clear: they have a capacity of about 700 MB of data, or roughly ten full albums. The best MP3 players equipped with flash memory at the time had 64 MB, which could barely hold one album, but cost several times more. However, all types of existing MP3 devices have two things in common: they are difficult to control and uploading music to them is time-consuming. With flash memory-equipped players, it takes a very long time to transfer an album via USB 1.1, while with CD players, it takes a long time to burn a CD. At that time, it was basically true that transferring music to a device took as long as the music itself lasted—a five-minute song took about five minutes, but an hour-long album took an hour. The only way to do it faster was to burn an entire CD with MP3s.

This meant that MP3 players were limited to technology enthusiasts rather than music fans. With a standard flash MP3 player, you couldn’t really choose music to suit your mood; it could only hold one album and that was it. Hard disk MP3 players, on the other hand, were large and did not work well when running or at the gym, as playback would stutter because the laser reader did not like bouncing around. In general, however, it was clear that there was interest in the market; it was just a matter of solving user problems. However, no one was particularly keen to do so. The MP3 player market was dominated by Korean and Chinese companies, which at the time did not have much experience in adapting devices to users. European and American companies, on the other hand, were not particularly keen to develop MP3 players because they feared disputes with associations representing music publishers. After all, a lawsuit with BMW, which had dared to launch a model equipped with a CD player that could also read MP3s on the American market, was just beginning. This was not a breeding ground that large and respectable corporations were willing to rush into headlong.

Not so Steve Jobs.

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