After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

by Tripp Mickle

Jobs pressed to create a portable music player. The nascent MP3 market sparked dreams of a next-generation Sony Walkman. The project took flight after Jon Rubinstein, the head of hardware engineering, discovered that Toshiba’s semiconductor unit had created a miniature disk drive that would hold a thousand songs. He pushed to buy the rights to every disk Toshiba made. To run the project, Jobs hired Tony Fadell, a hardware engineer who had worked on General Magic’s personal digital assistant. Rubinstein and Fadell assembled the components, while Apple’s head of marketing, Phil Schiller, contributed the idea of creating a wheel to scroll through songs, a concept inspired by a Bang & Olufsen phone. They handed the ingredients to Ive to package.