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Jon Rubinstein ’78 EE,one of the developers of the iPod, describes the team approach and consumer focus that created the popular digital music player.
By Ken Aaron
Flying across the Atlantic Ocean last month, three of the four people sitting closest to me had small white circles stuck inside their ears. The same plastic doodads adorned a couple of people in the row in front of me; same for the row behind. In fact, as I looked around, I could see those dime-sized earphones, and the dangling white plastic cords that tethered them to iPods, in row after row.
That’s sweet music to Cornell Engineering alumnus Jon Rubinstein.
Since it was released that November, more than 20 million iPods have been sold, including more than 10 million this year alone. At its core, the iPod is little more than a screen and a hard drive and some other electronics. But that plastic and metal box, little bigger than a deck of playing cards, has changed Apple’s fortunes from the maker of a well-loved but slow-selling line of computers to a relevant-again player in the electronics world.
Rubinstein, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1978 and followed that with a master of engineering degree in electrical engineering from Cornell a year later (he also has a master’s in computer science from Colorado State University), has led Apple’s hardware engineering efforts since 1997. But the nature of his contribution to the iPod project has been largely unheralded. That’s because at Apple, personalities are secondary and products are king, produced by group effort and hatched with much hoopla to a rabid fan base before heading to store shelves.
And the hard-charging Rubinstein keeps with that tradition, crediting the success to his team and speaking of his goals with an eye toward the consumer. His first goal, he says, is to make the best products on the market; his second is to build the best engineering team in the world. “To achieve number one, you really need to achieve number two,” he says.
The development of the iPod started with the realization that, in the future, consumers would have a constellation of electronic devices that would tie into their home computers. “Our strategy here at Apple has been the digital hub. It started with that six years ago,” Rubinstein said in a recent telephone interview from Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, the heart of Silicon Valley. “We saw the trends starting to form with digital video cameras, digital still cameras, with Palms, with cell phones and all of that. We started developing applications for all of those devices.”
So the drive to make the Macintosh, Apple’s personal computer line, a digital hub started with software that helped users edit videos (iMovie), organize photos (iPhoto), and keep track of their music (iTunes.)
The trouble with the Mac platform, though, was that even though its hardware and software were widely considered superior to personal computers running Windows, there were still far more Windows PCs than Mac users. The Mac’s market share was below 10 percent and falling.
Good applications might drive some people to buy Macs, and there’s some evidence that the iPod has convinced people to abandon their Windows PCs for the platform. But there was also sentiment that Apple could make a lot of money by making one of the devices that tap into the hub. “While iTunes was under development, we looked at the devices that were available on the market,” Rubinstein says. Video cameras and still cameras, Rubinstein and his crew found, were pretty well designed. Lots of people thought Apple would release a Palm-like organizer, but Jobs decided that their day might have passed.
“When we got to digital music players, what was out there was awful. They were big and they were heavy, the user interfaces were terrible,” Rubinstein says.
The players that relied on hard drives to store music were too bulky. The ones that used flash-memory chips could only store a handful of tracks. In both varieties, it took too long to transfer songs from computers to the devices, and navigating through those songs was painful enough to make users long for cassette tapes.
“So Steve asked me to go do a music player,” Rubinstein says.
But in 2000, when Apple first started thinking about making a music player, “the technology really wasn’t there yet to make a great player,” Rubinstein recalls.
But much of what he knew was necessary really wasn’t that far away. So in early 2001, Rubinstein assembled a team to figure out which technologies could be brought together quickly to make a best-in-show music player.
An example of how those pieces came together can be found in the hard drive that led to the device’s first marketing campaign — to “put 1,000 songs in your pocket” — and was key to making it a reality.
Greg Joswiak, vice president of iPod product marketing, has worked alongside Rubinstein since 1997. “Jon’s very good at seeing a technology and very quickly assessing how good it is,” Joswiak says. “The iPod’s a great example of Jon seeing a piece of technology’s potential — that very, very small form-factor hard drive.”
That tiny hard drive, which was 5 gigabytes in the first model but now comes in sizes up to 60 gigabytes, was unearthed during one of Rubinstein’s frequent visits to Apple’s suppliers.
“The way we found the hard drive, for example, we were doing our usual tech review with the vendor in Japan. We were reviewing the standard drive road map that we were using in our standard product.”
While doing that run-through with Toshiba, somebody there mentioned that company’s work on a 1.8-inch hard drive, a cool engineering project that didn’t yet have a home. “If you could find a use for that, we’d really like that,” Toshiba told Apple.
Rubinstein’s familiarity with the supply chain is one reason why he was able to bring the iPod to market so quickly, said Mike McGuire, a research director for GartnerG2, a technology consulting firm. “A lot of it came down to the manufacturability of it,” McGuire says. “It’s one thing to come up with a great concept. It’s another thing to make it manufacturable.”
He points to the metal back on the iPod as an example of where Rubinstein’s expertise came in. Tooling up a production line to produce that shiny back, every single one of which can be personally engraved, wasn’t trivial, McGuire says, and “speaks a lot to his contacts in the manufacturing world.”
Those are just two bits of the finished product. There were plenty of other hurdles to overcome, Rubinstein says, such as figuring out how to squeeze a dozen hours of music out of the tiny battery (it involves storing the current song on a memory chip so the hard drive doesn’t spin incessantly, sucking juice.) There’s a perpetual quest to shrink the internal electronics. And there’s software, of course; half of the iPod’s design team is devoted to the program that runs it. It was no mean feat to produce an interface that never stalls or hiccups when listeners breeze through their songs.
Four years later, Apple still holds a commanding lead in the portable music player market, holding 75 percent of the market. Even Sony, which once invented a portable cassette player called the Walkman that made the notion of carrying around personalized music a reality, has had trouble coming up with a solution; its MP3 players haven’t attracted much of a following in Europe and North America, where Apple is dominant by far.
The reason why Apple stays ahead of the pack, consensus goes, is because its product designers and its engineers collaborate from the beginning. “Everybody may have these outrageously cool ideas, but you have to turn it over to the manufacturing guys at some point,” McGuire says.
Rubinstein acknowledges that Apple’s strength comes from its tendency to consider the average person who would use the device.
“We look at the whole problem, from silicon all the way up to the Internet,” he says. “The iPod is successful because we work on the whole user experience. It’s not impossible, but it’s really hard for other companies to duplicate what we’ve done,” he says.
That experience begins at the point when you unpack your iPod from the box, which is a black sheath that has actual-size photos of the iPod printed on it. Inside the sheath is a box that opens like a book; on one side is the iPod, and on the other, accessories. “Designed by Apple in California” are the only words on the sheath, another reminder that the iPod you are about to turn on was crafted from the loving minds at the company and didn’t just fall off some production line somewhere.
The product that results from that kind of arm’s-length arrangement is often a confusing mish-mash that only somebody with a computer science degree could understand. Not that that stops these devices from reaching the market — because in tech circles, elegance is favored less than impressing other techies.
Fred Schneider, a Cornell professor of computer science whose operating systems class helped inspire Rubinstein to pursue a career in computers, says Apple’s insistence on making its technology transparent to the user keeps it successful.
“All these geeks go off and worry about building computing systems that are neat in some way or another technically and think of a computing system as a special sort of thing. And what Rubinstein taught me, it’s no different than a vacuum cleaner. It has to be that easy to use. It has to be that easy, from the time you open the box, so he and the folks at Apple have a very different model of doing business than any other computing company.”
As intensely consumer oriented as the iPod is, much of Rubinstein’s career has involved working on far less visible, but more powerful, projects. At Hewlett-Packard, where he worked after graduating from Cornell, Rubinstein developed workstations. At his next stop, the bygone Stardent, he was responsible for processor development of a graphics supercomputer.
That technology sounds a lot heavier than what he’s dealing with today. But it’s not too far different.
“When you’ve got a heritage of dealing with incredibly complex things, when you get paired with a bunch of people who can design really cool things, it’s a challenge, and probably a good one,” McGuire says.
Rubinstein downplays the significance of any difference in his current and past work. Both the cheapest iPod, at $99, and the $10,000 servers he used to work on share similar lineage, Rubinstein says. “Both are storage devices,” he says. “Apple’s a consumer company in its heart. From my perspective, the iPod’s just an evolution of that.”
One of Rubinstein’s next challenges will be to figure out what else will fit under that brand logically. He’s not talking — Apple never does about such things — but the rumor mill is ablaze. A video iPod? An iPod phone? Something with wireless Internet? Something else entirely?
“There’s just so many dimensions of what we’re doing that I see a lot more opportunity going forward,” he says. So far, the company has shrunk not only the iPod — its smallest model, the Shuffle, is the same size as a pack of gum — but also its price; iPods sell from $99 now up to $399.
Rubinstein’s not in the lab doing schematics and ground-level design work any more. His job encompasses everything from exhorting his team to make the device cheaper, to working closely with the legions of companies making iPod add-ons, such as cases, FM transmitters, and other accessories, to plotting a roadmap for future iPod development. “It’s a real pleasure to be able to work through a large team of people and create lots of products because at the end of the day, I’m really a product guy. And by leveraging my skills with the capabilities of the team, we can make lots and lots of great products.”
In typical Apple fashion, he won’t talk about anything in the pipeline, other than to assure that it’s “really, really cool stuff.”
“I think we’re kind of just getting started,” Rubinstein says. “I think there’s a constant trend to how you improve the product. How do you raise the bar, make it better and better?”
Rubinstein, who keeps plenty of reggae, jazz, and 1970s rock on his iPods, understands why people get so attached to them. “It makes the music so accessible,” Rubinstein says. “It brings all your music together, and it’s just right there. That’s one of the cool things about the whole iPod project. We didn’t have to go to do case studies or focus groups. Everybody loves music. It was so obvious.” |
Rubinstein is senior vice president of Apple’s iPod division, a job he’s held since last year. He’s also one of the fathers of the iPod, the increasingly ubiquitous digital music player: Back in 2001, Rubinstein is the person whom legendary Apple CEO Steve Jobs entrusted with the responsibility of bringing a digital music player from concept to store shelves in an 8-month marathon sprint.
As much as iPod users rave about the iPod, it’s hard to tell by looking at it why it’s such a big deal, technologically. At its core, an iPod is a conglomeration of about a half-dozen different technologies that make a tiny package when bundled together. It has a display; it has a long-lasting rechargeable battery; it has a core microchip that drives the thing. Technologically speaking, iPod is more a direct descendant of other computer hardware than a new branch on the family tree. “From a system architecture point of view, it’s just a slightly scaled down version of the products we were already doing,” Rubinstein says.
I’m listening to an iPod while I write this. I’ve owned the album that’s playing, by a band called The Shins, for a lot longer than I’ve owned the iPod. In fact, I’ve owned almost all of the 1,606 songs currently on the slender white box, about the same size as a deck of cards, for years. But despite that, it’s exciting to hit “shuffle” on the tiny jukebox and have a track come up that you haven’t thought about, let alone heard, in years — it’s a bit like unwrapping the compact discs all over again. It’s that kind of re-discovery that makes the gadget more than a gadget. iPod users — and they include high schoolers, and lawyers, and retirees who’d rather not go anywhere near a computer otherwise — will tell you that the box practically changed their lives and is one of those things that they can’t imagine living without. But in a good way — most people can’t imagine living without a cell phone, either, but many people would also hurl them into the ocean if they could get away with it.