Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

really
into burning CDs, and Apple wasn’t catering to them. “I felt like a 
dope,” he told 
Fortune.
“I thought we had missed it. We had to work hard to catch up.”
Jobs added a CD burner to the iMac, but that wasn’t enough. His goal was to make it simple to 
transfer music from a CD, manage it on your computer, and then burn playlists. Other companies 
were already making music-management applications, but they were clunky and complex. One of 
Jobs’s talents was spotting markets that were filled with second-rate products. He looked at the 
music apps that were available—including Real Jukebox, Windows Media Player, and one that 
HP was including with its CD burner—and came to a conclusion: “They were so complicated that 
only a genius could figure out half of their features.”
That is when Bill Kincaid came in. A former Apple software engineer, he was driving to a track 
in Willows, California, to race his Formula Ford sports car while (a bit incongruously) listening to 
National Public Radio. He heard a report about a portable music player called the Rio that played 
a digital song format called MP3. He perked up when the reporter said something like, “Don’t get 
excited, Mac users, because it won’t work with Macs.” Kincaid said to himself, “Ha! I can fix 
that!”
To help him write a Rio manager for the Mac, he called his friends Jeff Robbin and Dave 
Heller, also former Apple software engineers. Their product, known as SoundJam, offered Mac 
users an interface for the Rio and software for managing the songs on their computer. In July 
2000, when Jobs was pushing his team to come up with music-management software, Apple 
swooped in and bought SoundJam, bringing its founders back into the Apple fold. (All three 
stayed with the company, and Robbin continued to run the music software development team for 
the next decade. Jobs considered Robbin so valuable he once allowed a 
Time
reporter to meet him 
only after extracting the promise that the reporter would not print his last name.)
Jobs personally worked with them to transform SoundJam into an Apple product. It was laden 
with all sorts of features, and consequently a lot of complex screens. Jobs pushed them to make it 
simpler and more fun. Instead of an interface that made you specify whether you were searching 
for an artist, song, or album, Jobs insisted on a simple box where you could type in anything you 
wanted. From iMovie the team adopted the sleek brushed-metal look and also a name. They 
dubbed it iTunes.

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Jobs unveiled iTunes at the January 2001 Macworld as part of the digital hub strategy. It would 
be free to all Mac users, he announced. “Join the music revolution with iTunes, and make your 
music devices ten times more valuable,” he concluded to great applause. As his advertising slogan 
would later put it: 
Rip. Mix. Burn.
That afternoon Jobs happened to be meeting with John Markoff of the 
New York Times.
The 
interview was going badly, but at the end Jobs sat down at his Mac and showed off iTunes. “It 
reminds me of my youth,” he said as the psychedelic patterns danced on the screen. That led him 
to reminisce about dropping acid. Taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things 
he’d done in his life, Jobs told Markoff. People who had never taken acid would never fully 
understand him.
The iPod
The next step for the digital hub strategy was to make a portable music player. Jobs realized that 
Apple had the opportunity to design such a device in tandem with the iTunes software, allowing it 
to be simpler. Complex tasks could be handled on the computer, easy ones on the device. Thus 
was born the iPod, the device that would begin the transformation of Apple from being a computer 
maker into being the world’s most valuable company.
Jobs had a special passion for the project because he loved music. The music players that were 
already on the market, he told his colleagues, “truly sucked.” Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein, and the 
rest of the team agreed. As they were building iTunes, they spent time with the Rio and other 
players while merrily trashing them. “We would sit around and say, ‘These things really stink,’” 
Schiller recalled. “They held about sixteen songs, and you couldn’t figure out how to use them.”
Jobs began pushing for a portable music player in the fall of 2000, but Rubinstein responded 
that the necessary components were not available yet. He asked Jobs to wait. After a few months 
Rubinstein was able to score a suitable small LCD screen and rechargeable lithium-polymer 
battery. The tougher challenge was finding a disk drive that was small enough but had ample 
memory to make a great music player. Then, in February 2001, he took one of his regular trips to 
Japan to visit Apple’s suppliers.
At the end of a routine meeting with Toshiba, the engineers mentioned a new product they had 
in the lab that would be ready by that June. It was a tiny, 1.8-inch drive (the size of a silver dollar) 
that would hold five gigabytes of storage (about a thousand songs), and they were not sure what to 
do with it. When the Toshiba engineers showed it to Rubinstein, he knew immediately what it 
could be used for. A thousand songs in his pocket! Perfect. But he kept a poker face. Jobs was also 
in Japan, giving the keynote speech at the Tokyo Macworld conference. They met that night at the 
Hotel Okura, where Jobs was staying. “I know how to do it now,” Rubinstein told him. “All I need 
is a $10 million check.” Jobs immediately authorized it. So Rubinstein started negotiating with 
Toshiba to have exclusive rights to every one of the disks it could make, and he began to look 
around for someone who could lead the development team.
Tony Fadell was a brash entrepreneurial programmer with a cyberpunk look and an engaging 
smile who had started three companies while still at the University of Michigan. He had gone to 
work at the handheld device maker General Magic (where he met Apple refugees Andy Hertzfeld 
and Bill Atkinson), and then spent some awkward time at Philips Electronics, where he bucked the 
staid culture with his short bleached hair and rebellious style. He had come up with some ideas for 
creating a better digital music player, which he had shopped around unsuccessfully to 
RealNetworks, Sony, and Philips. One day he was in Colorado, skiing with an uncle, and his cell 
phone rang while he was riding on the chairlift. It was Rubinstein, who told him that Apple was 
looking for someone who could work on a “small electronic device.” Fadell, not lacking in 
confidence, boasted that he was a wizard at making such devices. Rubinstein invited him to 
Cupertino.
Fadell assumed that he was being hired to work on a personal digital assistant, some successor 
to the Newton. But when he met with Rubinstein, the topic quickly turned to iTunes, which had 
been out for three months. “We’ve been trying to hook up the existing MP3 players to iTunes and 
they’ve been horrible, absolutely horrible,” Rubinstein told him. “We think we should make our 
own version.”

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Fadell was thrilled. “I was passionate about music. I was trying to do some of that at 
RealNetworks, and I was pitching an MP3 player to Palm.” He agreed to come aboard, at least as 
a consultant. After a few weeks Rubinstein insisted that if he was to lead the team, he had to 
become a full-time Apple employee. But Fadell resisted; he liked his freedom. Rubinstein was 
furious at what he considered Fadell’s whining. “This is one of those life decisions,” he told 
Fadell. “You’ll never regret it.”
He decided to force Fadell’s hand. He gathered a roomful of the twenty or so people who had 
been assigned to the project. When Fadell walked in, Rubinstein told him, “Tony, we’re not doing 
this project unless you sign on full-time. Are you in or out? You have to decide right now.”
Fadell looked Rubinstein in the eye, then turned to the audience and said, “Does this always 
happen at Apple, that people are put under duress to sign an offer?” He paused for a moment, said 
yes, and grudgingly shook Rubinstein’s hand. “It left some very unsettling feeling between Jon 
and me for many years,” Fadell recalled. Rubinstein agreed: “I don’t think he ever forgave me for 
that.”
Fadell and Rubinstein were fated to clash because they both thought that they had fathered the 
iPod. As Rubinstein saw it, he had been given the mission by Jobs months earlier, found the 
Toshiba disk drive, and figured out the screen, battery, and other key elements. He had then 
brought in Fadell to put it together. He and others who resented Fadell’s visibility began to refer to 
him as “Tony Baloney.” But from Fadell’s perspective, before he came to Apple he had already 
come up with plans for a great MP3 player, and he had been shopping it around to other 
companies before he had agreed to come to Apple. The issue of who deserved the most credit for 
the iPod, or should get the title Podfather, would be fought over the years in interviews, articles, 
web pages, and even