Steve Jobs’ most Impulsive Decision

As Apple tries to find his way in the word again an impulsive decision by Steve Jobs turns into an adventure for a group of engineers that would define the future of handheld technology forever.

0:00 Intro
0:33 The fall and return of Jobs
1:11 The iMac
2:10 Napster and the MP3 revolution
3:35 The Rise of MP3 players
5:29 "We need to make a pocket sized music player"
7:08 Tony Fadell
8:32 PortalPlayer
10:13 "Managing" jobs
11:56 Final touches
12:35 The Battery problem
13:43 The reveal

Corrections
10:00 This is particularly weird given that ARM was partially and Apple venture. I have no idea at the moment why their dev tools were Windows only.

Social media:

Credits:
Research and Writing: LowSpecAlex, F4mi
Voice over: LowSpecAlex
Editing: LowSpecAlex
3D animation: Windy, Divye
Art: Maiku no Koe
Spanish Translation, Audio editing and QA: Henrique von Buren
Thumbnail design: Maiku no Koe
VA director and sourcing: Jesús Hernández/Dubbing Home

Sources:
On the Origin of the iPod:

On the lawsuit that made mp3 players legal: Recording Industry Ass'n of America v. Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc, 180 F.3d 1072 (9th Cir. 1999).

Steve Jobs by Walter Issac, page 865

Stock Footage from Getty

[alexmcd]

I worked at CompUSA when the color iMac came out. My reaction was very PC user disdain, because I was kind of an ass back then. But one coworker took it to another level. He figured the green model would look the worst in people's houses, so he secretly told customers the green ones were faster. And people believed him. :/

[RyugaHidekiOrRyuzaki]

This channel's transition into tech history has been amazing. Keep it up Alex

[KantiDono]

"We have this tiny hard drive, but we have no idea what to use it for. Maybe you'd be interested?"
"How much?"
"Well, we're looking at pricing them for around $50, but maybe with some work we could bring the price down, and..."
"No no, how much for _all_ of them."

[schweepy_g]

I remember working on early mobile iPod/iPhone apps for my company and we had Apple tech support available to us for onsite visits. On one visit I asked them what is Steve like had they ever just talked to him. They all nervously burst out laughing like this question was soo alien to them, saying, 'Oh you never talk to Steve. You don't even look at him and you always hope he never talks to you and if you do you hope it's good because if not you might get fired on the spot for saying the wrong thing or him just being in the wrong mood at the time, but he never just walked around he was always headed straight for where he needed to go and that was always someone's desk.' Very eye-opening description of the man.

[RockOrso]

So LowSpecGamer transitioned to gaming on low specs to having low-specs to cover the most important thing we've forgotten as a community, the history of technology before that served as the foundation of today's tech.

[alexmcd]

He's right. The early mp3 player scene was a hot mess of janky low capacity and usually overpriced crap. I found a hybrid solution. It was a CD player with file system and mp3 decoder in firmware. So you could burn a huge (for the time) amount of music to a CD in mp3 format, and have a useful file structure for telling it to play only one album or one artist. It was also skip resistant. Fantastic device for the Era.

[shapesinaframe]

Fun fact: the FireWire connector design came from the Nintendo Gameboy link cable as it was proven to be resilient to withstand regular connections/disconnections with rough handling 😊

[philtkaswahl]

This channel is rapidly becoming one of my favorite tech history channels. The illustrations, in particular, give the vids a unique flavor.

[elemaire]

All I know is, I now want a Steve Jobs anime that focuses on his eccentricities and ridiculous yet ground breaking requests and expectations depicted in the most hilarious and dramatic way possible. Do it!

[TheLionAndTheLamb]

I had a teacher that got to meet Steve Jobs. He had spoken endlessly about how great Jobs was before he met him. After he met him he said, "He was kind of a big jerk". This was in the late 90's in the pre iPhone era. People often are not how they seem in our expectations.

[HaakonAnderson]

His most impulsive decision was trying to treat cancer with juice.

[liberty-matrix]

Steve Jobs’ most impulsive decision was when his neighbors had a party and everyone was looking over his backyard fence so he bought their house and bulldoze it flat for privacy.

[Nnda]

Apple got the last laugh. When the Xbox 360 was in development, all the engineers had to use PowerPC Macs 🤣

[WigWoo]

Holy Hell dude I gotta say when I heard that Steve Jobs voice you hired someone to do I went "Whoa" I really love hearing this video with custom voices, and you did a phenomenal job finding some good ones. I love how Stern and passionate in rage Steve was, but sounded calmly professional at the same time, if that makes sense

[DanCreaMundos]

Glad to see some content about Steve jobs, he has quite a history and was a very peculiar person in many good and bad ways

[DEHARDTOO]

Love the production quality as always! This was my first time checking the description and I'm so glad I did, to realize throwing the iPod prototype into the aquarium was real!

[tonychesser]

I remember reading some article where the author talked about observing someone with an iPod walking into a store, connecting to a Mac being displayed, copying some application over to the hard drive on their iPod, then disconnecting and walking out of the store. Did they succeed in copying the app for their system at home? Unknown. But ... connect ... drag and drop ... seconds pass ... disconnect ... walk off with a pile of data ... eminently do-able.

FireWire was able to handle about 400 Mbits at that time and, unlike USB, many interfaces could actually get real-world transfer rates pretty close to the max theoretical of 50 MB / sec. That's kinda important if you're trying to transfer digital video off your camcorder to your Mac. If your iPod could cache incoming data over to the 32 MB of RAM on its way to getting onto the hard drive, you could fill that space in less than a second. Even 1 GB of data wouldn't take long; the hard drive interface would be the bottleneck.

So I expect it would be VERY easy to use such a device for espionage.

[BrendanWeibrecht]

All this lesser-known tech history is fascinating and really well-told. This is now one of my favourite channels! <3

[ashamaniq]

Steve kicking down the door is probably one of the most accurate representations of him 😂

[zaidlacksalastname]

With this shift in content, you answered what other youtubers worry about, which is "do they watch for the content or for me?". Shifting from making games run on low end pcs to tech history documentaries while retaining your old fans and making new ones shows that people will follow you on whatever you love, and that's something to be proud of. Well done!