Chapter 9 The iPod

A service avatar

We don’t see how you convince people to stop being thieves, unless you can offer them a carrot — not just a stick. And the carrot is: We’re gonna offer you a better experience…and it’s only gonna cost you a dollar a song.

Steve Jobs, December 2003, Rolling Stone

Writing about the iPod is like writing about Thomas Edison’s light bulb. Both are objects of such reverence that understanding what makes them interesting and important requires hacking through layers of popular mythology. One such myth is that both the light bulb and the portable MP3 player were overnight successes. Another myth attributes their success to clever technologies (the filament in the light bulb and the tiny hard disk in the iPod). ...

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