Galery

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Ivan Petkov

iPod

We are at the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century, broadband connection is on the horizon, the era of Napster is the thing which anyone would relate MP3 and audio music standard to, exchanged and shared. Record companies are conducting lawsuits against piracy of music on the Internet stigmatizing the network and the MP3 format as piracy. Nobody can imagine that amid this disruption we will ever see sales of single tracks in MP3 format on the Internet. In September 2001 the case against the founder of Napster is almost resolved and right at this very moment none other than Apple announces the launch of a product which will subsequently change, in the next 10 years, what everybody considered unthinkable at the time. Moreover, it will pave the way for other products that will change the IT and telecommunications industries for ever. The iPod appears.

The iPod was publicly presented on 21st October 2001, developed by a team consisting of the following members: Steve Jobs, designer Jonathan Eve, John Rubinstein, who subsequently became CEO of Palm, and hardware engineers Tony Fadel and Michael Dewey. The first iPod has 5 GB of memory, where you can "store about 1000 songs in your pocket". The first iPod is a product which only works with Mac.

On the 'wheel' are the main controls of the player.

 

In the beginning the iPod is almost invisible until the product is tied to iTunes and the service iTunes Store – a shop for the sale of legal music. Steve Jobs understands the desire of consumers to not purchase a whole album by an artist, out of which most often only 2-3 songs are hits, but only to buy the songs they want. iTunes Store appears on 29^th April, 2003 and just two years later, towards the end of 2004, the iPod + iTunes combination make iPod a dominating product on the U.S. market. In 2005 videos appeared in iTunes, and in the following year, 2006, also feature films.

Over the years the iPod has evolved and changed, different models of the product have appeared, so as to position it in different price categories and offer specific purposes - from the miniplayer for sports and travel to the media player for Internet, music, movies and applications. iPod sets the precedent for a business model, which in the years to come will change not only the music business. We shall see how.

iPhone

The next product that seems like a logical step in the development of Apple’s product line is actually seen in a very reserved way and is quite underestimated by the competitors. This is the era in which Nokia and Motorola are undisputed leaders in the telecommunications market. Nobody could even imagine how anyone could replace the omnipresent Nokia, which dominates in each class of phones, and many of their competitors, use their operating system, Symbian. Rumours of the appearance of iPod with the onset of opportunity to make phone calls are perceived as funny gossip rather than as serious signs of a product that will change the industry.

So, the iPhone is born on 9^th January 2007, when at the Macworld exhibition Steve Jobs presents the new product to the world. His work had been launched two years earlier, in 2005, in cooperation with AT & T Mobility. This is a phone that has a large capacitive touchscreen, it is powered by an operating system, which is now named iOS, and has only 1 Main control button on the phone (not counting the switch on/switch off buttons and those for the sound).