iPod is a brand of portable media players designed and marketed by Apple and launched in October 2001. Devices in the iPod range are primarily digital audio players, designed around a central click wheel — with exception to the iPod Shuffle, which uses buttons because of its size. As of October 2005, the line-up consists of the video-capable fifth generation iPod, the smaller iPod nano, and the display-less iPod shuffle. The full-sized model stores media on an internal hard drive, while the smaller iPod nano and iPod shuffle use flash memory. Like many digital music players, iPods can also serve as external data storage devices. In January 2007, Apple announced the iPhone, a device that combined the features of the video-capable iPod with mobile phone and mobile Internet capabilities.
Apple's iTunes software is used to transfer music to the devices. As a free jukebox application, iTunes stores an entire music library on the user's computer and can play, burn, and rip music from a CD. It can also transfer photos, videos, games, and calendars to the models that support them.
Apple focused its development on the iPod's unique user interface and its ease of use, rather than on technical capability. As of October 2004, the iPod is the world's best-selling range of digital audio players and its worldwide mainstream adoption made it one of the most popular consumer brands. Some of Apple's design choices and proprietary actions have, however, led to criticism and legal battles.
On Monday, April 9, 2007, Apple announced that over 100 million iPods had been sold worldwide.[1] This makes the iPod the best-selling music player in history.
History and design
iPod came from Apple's digital hub strategy,[2] when the company began creating software for the growing market of digital devices being purchased by consumers. Digital cameras, camcorders and organizers had well-established mainstream markets, but the company found existing digital music players "big and clunky or small and useless" with user interfaces that were "unbelievably awful",[2] so Apple decided to develop its own. Apple's hardware engineering chief, Jon Rubinstein, assembled a team of engineers to design it, including Tony Fadell, hardware engineer Michael Dhuey, and design engineer Jonathan Ive, with Stan Ng as the marketing manager. The product was developed in less than a year and unveiled on 23 October 2001. CEO Steve Jobs announced it as a Mac-compatible product with a 5 GB hard drive that put "1000 songs in your pocket."
Uncharacteristically, Apple did not develop iPod's software entirely in-house. Apple instead used PortalPlayer's reference platform which was based on 2 ARM cores. The platform had rudimentary software running on a commercial microkernel embedded operating system. PortalPlayer had previously been working on an IBM-branded MP3 player with Bluetooth headphones.[3] Apple contracted another company, Pixo, to help design and implement the user interface, under the direct supervision of Steve Jobs.[2] Once established, Apple continued to refine the software's look and feel. Starting with the iPod mini, the Chicago font was replaced with Espy Sans. Later iPods switched fonts again to Podium Sans — a font similar to Apple's corporate font Myriad. iPods with color displays then adopted some Mac OS X themes like Aqua progress bars, and brushed metal in the lock interface.
The name iPod was proposed by Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter, who (with others) was called by Apple to figure out how to introduce the new player to the public. After Chieco saw a prototype, he thought of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and the phrase "Open the pod bay door, Hal!", which refers to the white EVA Pods of the Discovery One spaceship. Apple had previously registered the name "iPod" for Internet kiosks, but never put it to use.[2]
Software
iPod can play MP3, AAC/M4A, Protected AAC, AIFF, WAV, Audible audiobook, and Apple Lossless audio file formats. iPod photo introduced the ability to display JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, and PNG image file formats. Fifth generation iPods can additionally play MPEG-4 (H.264/MPEG-4 AVC) and QuickTime video formats, with restrictions on video dimensions, encoding techniques and data-rates. Unlike most other media players, Apple does not support Microsoft's WMA audio format — but a converter for non-Digital Rights Management (DRM) WMA files is provided with the Windows version of iTunes. MIDI files also cannot be played, but can be converted to audio files using the "Advanced" menu in iTunes. Alternative open-source audio formats such as Ogg Vorbis and FLAC are not supported. Each time iPod connects to its host computer, iTunes will synchronize entire music libraries or music playlists and the user can choose for automatic or manual synchronization. Song ratings can be set on iPod and synchronized later to the iTunes library, however only one host computer is allowed.
User interface
iPods with color displays use anti-aliased graphics and text, with sliding animations. These iPods have five buttons and the later generations have the buttons integrated into the click wheel — an innovation which gives an uncluttered, minimalist interface. The buttons are:
- Menu: to traverse backwards through the menus, and toggle the backlight on older iPods
- Center: to select a menu item
- Play / Pause: this doubles as an off switch when held
- Skip Forward / Fast Forward
- Skip Backwards / Fast Reverse
Other operations such as scrolling through menu items and controlling the volume are performed by using the click wheel in a rotational manner, while an additional Hold switch helps prevent accidental button presses. iPod shuffle does not have a click wheel and instead has five buttons positioned differently to the larger models: It has a Play / Pause button in the center, surrounded by four buttons: Volume Up / Down and Skip Forward / Backwards. The later models automatically pause playback when the headphones are unplugged from the headphone jack, but playback does not resume upon re-insertion. An iPod that has crashed or frozen can be reset by switching Hold on then off, then pressing Menu and Center (Menu and Play on the third generation iPod) for 6 seconds.[4]
Operating system and firmware
iPod's operating system is stored on its dedicated storage medium. An additional NOR flash ROM chip (either 1 MB or 512 KB) contains a bootloader program that tells the device to load its OS from the storage medium. Each iPod also has 32 MB of RAM, although the 60 and 80 GB fifth generation have 64 MB. A portion of the RAM is used to hold the iPod OS loaded from firmware, but the majority of it serves to cache songs from the storage medium. For example, iPod could spin its hard disk up once and copy approximately 30 MB of upcoming songs into RAM, thus save power by not requiring the drive to spin up for each song. Rockbox and iPodLinux offer open-source alternatives to the standard firmware and operating system, respectively.
iTunes Store
The iTunes Store is an online media store run by Apple and accessed via iTunes. It was introduced on 29 April 2003 and it sells individual songs, with typical prices being US$0.99, AU$1.69 (inc. GST), NZ$1.79 (inc. GST), EU€0.99, or GB£0.79 per song. iPods are the only portable music players that can play the purchased music. The store became the market leader soon after its launch[5] and Apple announced the sale of videos through the store on 12 October 2005. Full-length movies became available on 12 September 2006.[6]
Purchased audio files use the AAC format with added encryption. The encryption is based on the FairPlay DRM system. Up to five authorized computers and an unlimited number of iPods can play the files. Burning the files onto an audio CD, then re-compressing to a different lossy format can create music files without the DRM, although this results in reduced quality. The DRM can also be removed using third-party software. In March, 2007, Steve Jobs announced in colaboration with EMI that the iTunes Store would begin to sell DRM-free song begining in June 2007 at US$ 1.29.
iPods cannot play music files from competing music stores that use rival-DRM technologies like Microsoft's protected WMA or RealNetworks' Helix DRM. Example stores include Napster and MSN Music. RealNetworks claims that Apple is creating problems for itself,[7] by using FairPlay to lock users into using the iTunes Store. Steve Jobs stated that Apple makes little profit from song sales, although Apple uses the store to promote iPod sales.[8] iPods can however play music files from online stores that do not use DRM, such as eMusic or Amie Street.
Additional features
In March 2002, Apple added limited PDA-like functionality: Text files can be displayed, while contacts and schedules can be viewed and synchronized with the host computer.[9] Some built-in games are available, including Brick (a clone of Breakout), Parachute, Solitaire, and Music Quiz. A firmware update released in September 2006 brought some extra features to fifth generation iPods including adjustable screen brightness, gapless playback, and downloadable games (available for purchase from the iTunes Store).
File storage
All iPods can function as mass storage devices to store data files; this function is controlled by the "Enable Disk Use" option in iTunes. If the iPod is formatted on a Mac OS X computer it uses the HFS+ file system format, which allows it to serve as a boot disk for a Mac computer.[citation needed] If it is formatted on Windows, the FAT32 format is used. With the advent of the Windows-compatible iPod, iPod's default file system switched from HFS+ to FAT32, although it can be reformatted to either filesystem (excluding the iPod shuffle which is strictly FAT32). Generally, if a new iPod (excluding the iPod shuffle) is initially plugged into a computer running Windows, it will be formatted with FAT32, and if initially plugged into a Mac running Mac OS X it will be formatted with HFS+.
Unlike most other MP3 players (including PlaysForSure devices), simply copying files to the drive with a file management application will not allow iPod to properly access them. The user must use software that has been specifically designed to transfer media files to iPods, so that the files are playable and viewable. Aside from iTunes, several alternative third-party applications are available on a number of different platforms.
iTunes cannot transfer songs or videos from iPod to computer,[citation needed] although iTunes 7 allows it for music purchased through the iTunes Music Store. Media files are stored on the iPod in a hidden folder, together with a proprietary database file. The hidden content can be accessed on the host operating system however, by enabling hidden files to be shown.[citation needed] The audio can then be recovered manually by dragging the files or folders onto the iTunes Library or by using third-party software.
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