IEEE Spectrum September, 2008 - 46

Continued from page 53

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were rolling off assembly lines. They
worked well, except for one nasty bug.
At roughly 10 hours of use, "battery life
was good," Rubinstein says, "but a bug
made it look like batteries were going
bad." A software update a few months
later fixed the problem.
From the moment he'd seen the
1.8‑inch disk drive, Rubinstein hadn't
had much doubt that the eventual
product would be a runaway hit. But
even he was unprepared for the vis‑
ceral reaction it provoked-even in
himself. "We all wanted one," he says,
"and that's usually key. And everyone
who used one loved it."

o

kay, you may know some of
that history. But what you prob‑
ably don't know is that during the
precise period the iPod design saga
was playing out, a whole other drama was
unfolding in Rubinstein's personal life. Just
before the discussions about doing a lit‑
tle music player began in September 2000,
Rubinstein met Karen Richardson, then
CEO of E.piphany, a company launched by
Rubinstein's close friend Steve Blank.
Blank knew what Rubinstein was
looking for in a woman-"smart, tough,
and pretty," he says, "maybe in that
order," and Richardson had it. Blank
was also pretty sure that Rubinstein was
right for Richardson. People had been
trying to introduce the two for years, but
busy schedules got in the way. "It was
like the Keystone Cops," Blank recalls.
"My wife and I kept having these big
events. We'd invite them both. First
one made it, the other didn't. Then the
other made it, and the first one didn't."
Finally, Blank got them both to his
house for a small dinner party. Within
30 days they were an item.
So, in the midst of shepherding the
iPod and running the rest of Apple's
mechanical engineering, chip design,
industrial design, and several other
departments, Rubinstein was also help‑
ing to plan a wedding for 13 October 2001-
10 days before the planned iPod launch,
postponed a bit so that Rubinstein could
get away for a one‑week honeymoon to
local beach retreats Big Sur and Stinson
Beach. Rubinstein had to interrupt his
honeymoon only once to go to the office
to recut the audio track for the video to
be shown at the launch.
The reaction at the introduction was
mixed. People thought the new device
was cool, Rubinstein says, but at $399,

overpriced. "I told everyone, 'Look at
what some people will pay for a pair of
Nikes.' " It's an interesting comparison,
in view of the fact that he himself looks
for discounts on last year's sneakers.
Sales were solid but not spectacular.
As it turned out, the obstacle wasn't price
but PC compatibility. In intense debates
within the company, Rubinstein sup‑
ported opening up the iPod to Microsoft
Windows. He based his argument on his
experience with the AirPort Express
wireless base station, which actually did
support PCs but lacked a PC setup assis‑
tant and a dedicated marketing channel.
As a result, AirPort didn't do nearly as
well as it could have, had the company
gone after the PC market. But the inter‑
nal thinking was that the purpose of
AirPort products was to sell more Macs.
"We didn't understand that it would be a
multibillion‑dollar business, so we basi‑
cally handed the business to Linksys."
Rubinstein didn't want Apple to
repeat that mistake with the iPod. It
didn't. Within six years of its introduc‑
tion, Apple sold 100 million iPods. By
comparison, DVDs sold 44 million units
in the same initial time span.
Even as he took the helm of the newly
created iPod division, Rubinstein began
talking to Jobs about making a graceful
exit from Apple. He gave Jobs 18 months'
notice-time enough to bring out the
next generation of iPods, the Video iPod
and the Nano-and even get the iPhone
team assembled and some of the core
technologies in place.
T h e c o nv e nt i o n a l w i s d o m o n
Rubinstein's departure was that he'd had
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum September, 2008
