A Brief History Of Ipod
May 4th, 2011 Bill Huiting
iPod is a digital mp3 / mp4 player developed and marketed by Apple Inc., an American consumer electronics multinational corporation. In the course of their research, Apple found that in comparison to available camcorders, digital cameras, and organizers; digital music players recorded poor sales, primarily due to their awful user interfaces.
Apple wanted to do some thing about it and so Jon Rubinstein, Apple's hardware engineering chief brought together a team comprising of Tony Fadell (who dreamed of a difficult disk based music player), Michael Dhuey (hardware engineer), Jonathan Ive (design engineer), and Stan Ng (marketing and advertising manager). In much less than a year, they created a difficult disk based music player, that had a 5 GB difficult drive and capable of storing 1000 songs.
Apple's iTunes software program is utilized to operate the iPod (m3 / mp4 player). The software is compatible with all Mac systems. The operating system is stored on its tough 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 difficult disk.
The iPod has a 32 MB of RAM, a portion of which is employed to hold the operating system from firmware, and the rest is used to cache songs from the hard disk. Apple also invented a technology whereby the hard disk of iPod could spin up as soon as and about 30 MB of upcoming songs might be cached into the RAM. This did not call for the difficult disk to spin up for each song and thereby saved battery power. Apple also introduced a Windows version of iPod, at a later stage.
The 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 convertor accomplishes conversion, for non-Digital Rights Management (DRM). Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, along with other open-source audio formats aren't supported at all.
Apple wanted an extremely user friendly interface and therefore adopted the minimalist interface, which attributes only five essential buttons, namely, Menu (to access functions and to toggle the backlight); Center (for menu item selection); Play/ Pause (this also works as an off switch when held for couple of seconds); Skip Forward/ Quick Forward; and Skip Backwards/ Fast Reverse.
An additional Hold button is provided for accidental button pressing prevention, and it can reset the iPod if it has frozen or crashed. Functions like volume control, scrolling are handled by the usage of the rotational click wheel. Later models have some minor changes inside the functions of the buttons but overall the number of buttons has remained at five.
To market this path-breaking mp3 / mp4 player, they required a suitable futuristic name and so they hired a freelance copywriter, Vinnie Chieco, along with other writers to give a name. Inspired by the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as the dialogue "Open the pod bay door, Hal!" with reference to the context of the Discovery 1 spaceship and its white EVA Pods, Vinnie Chieco proposed the name of the product as iPod. The management of Apple accepted the proposed name and on 23 October 2001, the iPod was officially launched. The rest they say is history.
To allow consumers to access songs of their choice, Apple opened up an online media store The iTunes Store on 29 April 2003, where individual songs might be downloaded at prices less than a U.S. dollar per song. The bought songs may be played only on iPods. Subsequent versions of this iPod (mp3 / mp4 player) also featured video capabilities, and thus iTunes Store began selling short videos from 12 October 2005. From 12 September 2006, full-length movies were also accessible at the iTunes Store.
iPods have come a long way from their inception, and now the most recent fifth generation iPods possess multimedia capabilities and are available in both Mac OS and Windows OS versions.
Generally, if a new iPod is plugged into a Mac OS personal computer, then the hard disk of this mp3 / mp4 player is formatted as per the HFS+ file format, and if it plugged into a Windows OS pc, it is formatted as per the FAT32 file format. From becoming a digital music player, the iPod has now transformed into a digital media player.About the Author:
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