A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BIRTH OF THE iPod

Brief history of the iPod- History the birth of the iPod | iPod is the mp3 player / digital mp4 developed and marketed by Apple Inc., an American multinational consumer electronics company. During their research, Apple found that in comparison to available camcorders, digital cameras, and organizers; digital music players recorded poor sales, primarily due to their poor user interface. Apple wants to do something about it and so Jon Rubinstein, Apple's hardware engineering chief brought together a team consisting of Tony Fadell (who dreamed of a music player based hard disk), Michael Dhuey (hardware engineer), Jonathan Ive (design engineer ), and Stan Ng (marketing manager). In less than a year, they designed a hard drive based music player, which has a 5 GB hard drive and capable of storing 1000 songs. Apple's iTunes software is used to operate the iPod (m3 / mp4 player). The software is compatible with all Mac systems. The operating system is stored on its hard disk. A boot loader program is contained in a NOR flash ROM chip (either 1 MB or 512 KB) which instructs the device to load the operating system from the hard disk. The iPod has 32 MB of RAM, some of which are used to store the operating system from firmware, and the rest is used to cache songs from the hard disk. Apple also find a technology in which hard disk your iPod could spin up once and about 30 MB of upcoming songs could be cached to RAM. This does not require a hard disk to spin up for each song and thereby saved battery power. Apple also introduced a Windows version of the iPod, the next stage. Audio files that iPod (mp3 / mp4 player) supports are MP3, AAC/M4A, Protected AAC, AIFF, WAV, Audible audiobook, and Apple Lossless audio file formats. MIDI and WMA files can be played only after a converter complete the conversion, for non-Digital Rights Management (DRM). Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and open source audio format is not supported at all. Apple wanted an extremely user friendly interface and thus adopted the minimalist interface, which features only five essential buttons, namely, Menu (to access the functions and to activate the backlight); Center (for the selection of menu items); Play / Pause (this also works as switch off when the last for a few seconds); Skip Forward / Fast Forward, and Skip Backwards / Fast Reverse. Hold additional buttons are provided for accidental button pressing prevention, and can reset the iPod if it has frozen or crashed. Functions such as volume, scrolling control is handled by using the click wheel rotation. Later models have some minor changes in the function keys, but the overall number remains at five buttons. To market this path-breaking mp3 / mp4 player, they need a suitable futuristic name and so they hired a freelance copywriter, Vinnie Chieco, and other authors to give names. Inspired by the movie 2001: "! Open the pod bay door, Hal" A Space Odyssey and the dialogue with reference to the context of the Discovery One spaceship and white EVA Pods, Vinnie Chieco proposed the name of the product as an iPod. Management of Apple accepted the proposed name and the date of October 23, 2001, the iPod was officially launched. The rest they say is history. To allow customers to access songs of their choice, Apple opened an online media store iTunes Store on April 29, 2003, in which each song can be downloaded at a price of less than one U.S. dollar per song. Songs that are purchased can only be played on iPods. The next version of this iPod (mp3 / mp4 player) also featured video capabilities, and thus iTunes Store started selling short videos from the October 12, 2005. From 12 September 2006, full-length movies are also available on the iTunes Store. The iPod has come a long way from their early, and now the latest fifth-generation iPods have multimedia capabilities and is available in Mac OS and Windows OS versions. Usually, if a new iPod is plugged into a Mac OS computer, then the hard disk of this mp3 player / mp4 formatted according to the HFS + file formats, and if plugged into a Windows OS computer, formatted as a FAT32 file format. From a digital music player, the iPod has now turned into a digital media player.