IPod Introduction
Steve Jobs
The field that we decided to do it in--the choice we made--was music. Now, why music? Well, we love music. And it’s always good to do something you love. More importantly, music’s a part of everyone’s life. Everyone. Music’s been around forever. It will always be around. This is not a speculative market. And, because it’s a part of everyone’s life, it’s a very large target market. All around the world. It knows no boundaries.

But, interestingly enough, in this whole new digital music revolution, there is no market leader. There are small companies, like Creative and SONICblue, and then there’s some large companies like Sony that haven’t had a hit yet. They haven’t found the recipe. No one has really found the recipe yet for digital music. And we think not only can we find the recipe, but the Apple brand is going to be fantastic, because people trust the Apple brand to get their great digital electronics from.

So, let’s look at portable music. Let’s look at the landscape. The first thing, if you want to listen to music portably, you can go out and buy a CD player, right? That’s one way to go. About 10 to 15 songs. Or you can buy a Flash Player--you can go out and buy one of those. You can buy an MP3 CD player, or you can buy a hard disk space jukebox player. And these are the four choices for portable music right now. So, let’s take a look at each one of those.

A CD player costs about $75, holds 10-15 songs on a CD, that’s about $5 a song. You go buy a Flash Player, you pay about double that--about $150, holds the same 10-15 songs, or about $10 a song. You can go buy an MP3 CD player, and an MP3 CD, which you can burn on your computer, costs about $150, but holds 150 songs. So you get down to $1 a song. Or, you can go buy a hard drive jukebox player for about $300, it holds about 1,000 songs, and costs about 30 cents a song.

So, we looked at this and studied all these and that is where we want to be. That is where we want to be. And we are introducing a product today that takes us exactly there, and that product is called iPod.

iMac. iBook. iPod.

What is iPod? iPod is an MP3 music player, has CD quality music, and it plays all of the popular open formats of digital music: MP3, MP3 Variable Bit Rate, WAV, and AIFF. But the biggest thing about iPod is it holds 1000 songs. Now, this is a quantum leap because for most people, it’s their entire music library. This is huge.

How many times have you gone on the road with a CD player and said, “Oh, God--I didn’t bring the CD I wanted to listen to.” To have your whole music library with you at all times is a quantum leap in listening to music.

The coolest thing about iPod is that your entire music library fits in your pocket. OK? You can take your whole music library with you, right in your pocket. Never before possible. So that’s iPod.

There are three major breakthroughs in iPod. Let’s take a look at each one of them. The first one is, it’s ultra-portable. So, if we’re going to keep 1000 songs on iPod, and it fits in your pocket, how do we do this? How do we possibly do this? Well, we start start off with an ultra-thin hard drive. We’ve got a 1.8” diameter hard drive that’s 0.2” thick. Super thin!

And that hard drive is 5 gigabytes in capacity. Five gigabytes, which holds 1000 songs at 160 kilobit rate, which is a very high-quality rate of MP3 compression. Very high-quality. A thousand songs on this 5 gigabyte drive. And we’ve built in 20 minute skip protection. That’s not 20 seconds; 20 minute skip protection. So you can take iPod bicycling, mountain climbing, jogging--you name it--and you’re not going to skip a beat.
So, we’ve got this 5 gigabyte drive that holds 1000 songs. How do we get the 1000 songs on the iPod? We don’t want to wait, so we’ve built in FireWire. Now, Apple, as you know, invented FireWire on every computer we make. It’s built into iPod. It’s the first and only music player with FireWire.

Why? Because it’s fast. You can download an entire CD into iPod in 5 to 10 seconds. An entire CD. So, let’s take a look at how it compares with USB. 5 to 10 seconds for FireWire to load a CD. On a USB player, you’re talking 5 minutes. Let’s talk about 1000 songs now. On iPod with FireWire, it is under 10 minutes, on a USB player, it is 5 hours. Can you imagine that? You get your USB player, you want to load 1000 songs, and you have to watch it for 5 hours while it loads the songs.

Under 10 minutes with iPod. It’s 30 times faster than any other MP3 player. So, huge win. Now, it doesn’t matter how many songs you have with you if your battery’s dead, right? So we have built in an extraordinary battery into iPod. Ten hours of battery life. And that is 10 hours of continuous music. We’re using a rechargeable lithium-polymer battery. This is a more advanced battery than we even use in our portable computers. It’s the most advanced battery we’ve ever shipped. And you can recharge this 10-hour battery in one hour, to 80% of its capacity, on a fast charge. One hour.

But maybe the coolest thing is that--you know FireWire--the FireWire cable carries all the data from the Mac to iPod? The FireWire also has power on it. And so, when you plug in to your Mac, it actually charges the iPod over that single FireWire cable. So you don’t have another charging cable to worry about. It charges over FireWire every time you plug into your Mac. Now you might say, “Well, what happens if I’m on the road with my iPod and I didn’t bring my Mac with me, and my battery’s running low? What do I do?” Well, we’ve got a really cool charger that ships as part of iPod, too, and this charger has a FireWire port on it. So you take your FireWire cable and just plug it right into the charger and plug it into the outlet, and charge iPod wherever you happen to be where there’s an outlet. So, ten hours of continuous music playback with the remarkable new battery technology.

Now, you might be saying, “Well, this is cool, this is cool but, you know, I’ve got a big hard disc in my portable--let’s say my iBook--I’m running iTunes, I’m really happy. I’ve got FireWire on my iBook. I don’t quite get 10 hours of battery life, but iBook’s got better battery life than any other consumer portable, so what’s so special about iPod here?”

It’s ultra-portable. An iBook is really portable, but this is ultra-portable. And let me show you what I mean. iPod is the size of a deck of cards. A deck of cards. It is 2.4” wide, it is 4.0” tall, and it is barely over three-quarters of an inch thick. This is tiny. It also only weighs 6.5 ounces. That is lighter than most of the cell phones you have in your pockets right now.

So, this is what’s so remarkable about iPod: it is ultra portable. We didn’t stop there. iPod has got Apple design. We’ve got one of the best design teams in the world, and they have done a remarkable job. Let me show you. This is what iPod looks from the side. Again, about ¾ of an inch thick. I’m going to show you the back first, because I’m in love with it. It’s stainless steel. It’s really, really durable. It’s beautiful. And this is what the front of it looks like: BOOM. That’s iPod. I happen to have one in my pocket, my friends. There it is, right there.

So, this amazing little device holds 1000 songs and it goes right in my pocket.
Write the lyrics for a misc song made in 2013, titled "IPod Introduction", by artist "Steve Jobs".