Tony Fadell describes rapid turnaround of the original iPod
Tony Fadell, Apple’s former engineer and iPod “Godfather”, shared the rapid timeline of the company’s music player – from concept to product in 10 months.
Tony Fadell, Apple’s former engineer and iPod “Godfather”, shared the rapid timeline of the company’s music player – from concept to product in 10 months.
The iPod Godfather Tony Fadell fears Apple and other technology firms have become too good at manipulating people into “another dopamine hit.”
Original iPhone team members Scott Forstall, Tony Fadell and Greg Christie recount the arduous process of turning Apple’s “Project Purple” into the best-selling device of our time.
Tony Fadell is stepping down as CEO of Nest, he announced in a blog post on Friday. The former Apple engineer and founder of the smart thermostat/device company, which was purchased by Google in 2014 for $3 billion, says he’s moving into an “advisor” role to Alphabet and CEO Larry Page.
Despite recent reports of turmoil within the company, Fadell insists that the move is amicable and the transition has been in progress since late last year. He says he’s leaving the company to new CEO Marwan Fawaz, who was previously CTO of cable company Charter, with a two-year roadmap in place.
It was The Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg, one of Steve Jobs’s favorite reviewers, of all people who has finally managed to persuade then Apple CEO to expand the addressable market for iPods by bringing iTunes to Windows PCs.
Jobs, Nest founder Tony Fadell and then Apple executive charged with iPod and iPhone development recalls, long insisted that the iPod be used as a vehicle to increase Mac sales. “Steve, the iPod is $399. But really it’s not. Because you have to buy a Mac!” We had to give people a taste,” Fadell recalls telling Jobs, to no avail.
He eventually relented and agreed that Apple should bring iTunes to Windows, under one condition: the software was to be tested by journalist Walt Mossberg. “We’re going to build these and run it by Mossberg,” Jobs reportedly said. “And if Mossberg says it’s good enough to ship, then we’ll ship it.”
Walt reportedly said, “Not bad. I’d ship it,” and the rest is history.
According to the famous iPod creator, former Apple engineer and Nest founder Tony Fadell, Steve Jobs did consider an idea of Apple building a car as far back as 2008, but ultimately decided not to move forward because he had other projects on his mind.
In a video interview with Bloomberg, Fadell said that Jobs and himself discussed how a hypothetical Apple car would we build, what features it would have, what a dashboard would be like and so forth.
Following the shut down of the Google Glass Explorer program and the reorganization of the Google Glass team, some theorized Google Glass may be dead. However Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, says the Google Glass technology is too fundamental for Google to end the project.Â
Nick Bilton of the New York Times is out with a fantastic piece detailing why Google Glass as we know it has been killed off by the Mountain View based company. Born out of the futuristic Google X lab, the headset was not only plagued by problems, but it was receiving attention from the mass-market that Google just wasn’t ready for.Â
Phil Schiller, Apple Senior Vice President of Marketing, didn’t have kind words to share when emailed about Google Glass, the search giant’s experimental wearable that’s about to be mass produced for consumers in 2015.
The iPod Godfather and Nest Labs co-founder and CEO, Tony Fadell, sat down with Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland to talk specifics of the recently announced $3.2 billion Google deal, why he sold to the search monster, Nest’s relationship with Apple, the future of controlling household products and a few other topics of interests, here are your soundbites…
Remember last month when we told you that Jony Ive’s one-of-a-kind Mac Pro sold for nearly $1 million at his Product (RED) auction? And do you remember thinking who in the world would pay that much money for a computer? Well it looks like the answer is Tony Faddell.
Photographer Kevin Abosch posted a handful of tweets this afternoon with photos of the ‘father of the iPod’ and Nest founder posing next to the (RED) Mac Pro, as well as the solid gold EarPods from the same auction. The two items combined sold for close to $1.5 million…
Tony Fadell, the brains behind the popular Nest thermostat, used to work at Apple where he’d helped engineer the iPod music player, earning him a nickname of the iPod Godfather. He also led the development of the first eighteen iterations of the original iPhone. In a recent interview, the famous engineer revealed that Apple in the past had experimented with the idea of a virtual reality headset and has actually built a few prototypes of a Google Glass-style device.
“The craziest thing we talked about was something like Google glass,” says former Senior VP of iPod division…