The future of Pixo

Pixo was sold to Sun Microsystems in 2003, and Paul Mercer continued to design systems for mobile devices. In 2006, he collaborated with Samsung on the Yepp Z5 MP3 player, but Mercer’s next foray into the world of Samsung MP3 players did not result in any significant breakthrough. The cards had already been dealt, although the headlines in the media at the time made a big deal out of it. In 2007, Mercer was hired by Palm to revive its mobile platform. Mercer became head of development for the webOS system, which HP (the buyer of Palm) discontinued in 2011. This does not change the fact that Mercer, with webOS, became a pioneer of the concept of an operating system based on web technologies. And to close the circle of fate for the people around Apple, Mercer was recruited to Palm by none other than Jon Rubinstein, who became Palm’s chairman in 2007 and later its CEO.

It is April 2001, and Apple has all the components it needs to quickly build its own MP3 player and launch it on the market by Christmas, meaning it must be delivered to stores by October at the latest. All that remains is to finish the small details: design and controls. Both were to be based on Apple’s established values, namely maximum simplicity. Steve Jobs personally even banned the iPod from having a power button; it would turn itself off and would definitely not have a special button for this purpose. Jobs also pushed through his vision that most of the functions should be handled by software on the computer, not on the iPod itself. As a result, it was not even possible to create playlists on the iPod, while “playlists” were a standard feature on all competing players. For the iPod, you had to (and still have to) create playlists in advance in iTunes, which were then uploaded to the iPod during synchronization. It wasn’t until July 2002 that the ability to generate smart playlists and pre-made playlists, such as most-played songs or rated songs, was added. Jobs argued that the user interface of small devices did not allow for convenient playlist creation or updating, and that people did not use them very much. For example, it was possible to create playlists on competing Rio players, but it was so complicated that very few users actually did so.

Another peculiarity was that music from the iPod could not be downloaded back to another computer. Jobs simply did not want his device to make it too easy to steal music; he believed that copyrighted works should be protected and did not want to contribute to their theft. The iPod was deliberately not designed to be connected as a disk from which data could be easily copied; it always had to be associated with a computer and an account on it, and when attempting to synchronize with another computer and account in iTunes, the iPod would overwrite the music library with a new one.

When the iPod was later criticized for not allowing files to be transferred for legitimate purposes, and it turned out that many people were indeed using their MP3 players to transfer documents from work to home, Apple added the ability to store data directly on the iPod, but although users stored music this way, it could not be played: the file systems for music and user data remained separate.

It may come as a surprise that the first iPods did not have any digital music protection (DRM) system. At that time, there were already a number of DRM systems in existence, but Apple apparently took a while to decide which one to choose. In the end, it chose Veridisc, a company founded in 2000 that developed a DRM called FairPlay, and incorporated the FairPlay DRM system into the iPod in a later firmware update, although there was no reason to use it until the launch of the iTunes Store in April 2003. How and under what conditions Apple acquired FairPlay is still unclear; the company never bothered to explain it, but Veridisc’s website, while it existed, listed FairPlay as a technology owned by Veridisc. However, Veridisc did not license it to anyone else, even though there were interested parties.

We will only touch briefly on the design of the iPod itself. The same principles applied here as with other Apple devices: a minimum of buttons, a minimum of controls, and the cleanest possible shapes. Jonathan Ive (*1967), who had been working at Apple since 1992 and became head of the design department in 1996, was responsible for the shapes. He insisted that the entire device and all its accessories be pure white—not computer white or black. Later, this color came to be known, both mockingly and respectfully, as Apple White, and the paint manufacturer Dulux even added Apple White to its range. What is less well known is that Apple had to have the color specially developed to prevent it from changing color due to temperature, which was a common phenomenon in white computer cases at the time.

There were other challenges besides the need to develop a special mixture for the white plastic. It also meant that the headphones had to be custom-made for the iPod, as only black ones were available at the time. The iPod’s overall appearance was based on the iMac, which was also Ive’s work. Ten years later (at the end of 2011), Jonathan Ive was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his design work. Queen Elizabeth has been using an iPod since 2005.

The idea of controlling the iPod with a control wheel came from marketing chief Phil Schiller, who thought that moving around the menu by moving your finger on the wheel would be the most natural way for users. Much later, there would be speculation as to why. When using the wheel, the user does not have to press anything or move their finger to another key when they want to change the direction of movement in the menu. In addition, it resembles the controls of an audio tower and does not cause mechanical fatigue of the material and thus inaccurate control. It is worth noting that the first iPod model had a mechanical wheel; it was not until the summer of 2002 that subsequent models were equipped with a touch wheel that could be operated with a finger. Stroke your iPod. It was the touch wheel that represented a significant breakthrough in iPod control.

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The future of Pixo

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