At Wired News, Leander "Cult of Mac" Kahney has returned to the topic of the birth of the iPod, which is no doubt going to end up as a reasonable academic study some day soon. And while many of the facts are fairly well known, the latest story stresses the team aspects -- probably correctly, since that's how the vast majority of industrial products are developed.
Kahney's 2004 tilt at the story, Inside Look at Birth of the IPod, which contains much more interesting detail, was based on information from Ben Knauss, a former employee of PortalPlayer. Naturally this put greater emphasis on Apple's use of PortalPlayer's reference design as the basis for the iPod, and PP's work with numerous partners. (See, for example, Electronics Design Chain magazine for more details.) The new story shifts the emphasis towards hardware engineer Jon Rubinstein, who was one of the NeXT team that took over Apple.
As for the iPod name, which initially sounded like an odd variant of Compaq's iPaq, Kahney writes:
The iPod name came from an earlier Apple project to build an internet kiosk, which never saw the light of day. On July 24, 2000, Apple registered the iPod name for "a public internet kiosk enclosure containing computer equipment," according to the filing.
"The name 'iPod' makes much more sense for an internet kiosk, which is a pod for a human, than a music player," said Athol Foden, a naming expert and president of Brighter Naming of Mountain View, California.
