Tony Fadell called me on a Friday afternoon in mid-June 2001 with news about the top-secret project we called “Crossover.” The first batch of development boards were in and he wanted to hear some music. The incomparable Ken Radke was on vacation, so I was next in line for bringup duties.
I ran an R&D outpost in Charlotte, North Carolina, for PortalPlayer, a Santa Clara fabless semiconductor startup who had created an ARM processor (the “PP5002”) and firmware stack for music players. My team was focused on mobile players so we worked on stuff like power management, music sync, and USB audio docks for cars.
All we knew about Crossover was that it was a music player of some kind.
I grabbed my laptop, JTAG, and other gear and handed the delighted-to-see-me USAir agent $2400 for a walkup coach ticket. Middle seat, naturally. I compressed my 6’ 4” pudgienerdbod into a ball and went into a flying-turtle hibernation stupor. Got to SFO, wandered down 101 towards Cupertino, crashed in some roach motel, showed up at 1 Infinite Loop the next morning.
The Sacred Temple was in power-save dark-mode, although you could see some labs were ripping along here and there. Tony and Guy Bar-Nahum took me up to their lab, where I met a group of their manufacturing partners. We went through the usual board bringup hassles, including flipping the obligatory reversed flash part around, and eventually got it to flash and boot. I didn’t have any code for the storage controller, so I hacked a chunk of PCM audio into the firmware image for testing.
I’m not sure which song it was, but it was one of three pop ditties that we used to test for thumpin’ bass response on tinny earbuds. I have wondered if I should have played something a bit more edifying in that historical-ish moment. Thus Spoke Zarathustra? The Hallelujah Chorus?
Naw, this widget was for teenyboppers. The cheesy pop tune was a perfect launch. Heh.
Whatever the tune, I got the soundy-bits playing for Tony and Guy. We talked through some design changes for better battery life, and that was that. Apple and the PortalPlayer Santa Clara and Seattle teams did the heavy lifting after that.
Time passed, and four months later Steve Jobs held up a new music player, and then smoothly slipped 1000 songs into those iconic 501s. I thought “so, that’s what that thing was” and got back to work on the power management firmware. Cause he also promised you, music lover, 10 hours of music playback and we were not even close.
PortalPlayer went on to do the PP5020, PP5021, and PP5022 processors for the iPod, Photo, Mini, and Nano. After being acquired by NVIDIA, it morphed into the Tegra. Eventually, Apple Silicon started producing their own ARM designs. And now NVIDIA wants to acquire ARM itself. Never a dull moment.
So. iPod. Happy 20th Birthday!
It was a hoot to be a tiny part of what you and your family have accomplished! I’m looking forward to that next One More Thing. Maybe an “M2” MacBook Pro? My 2014 retina is humming along just fine, but I’m ready for an upgrade...
If you were one of the many who worked on that iPod project, please share your war stories. If you are ex-PPI, DM me the IDs of the PCBAs in the picture. For extra credit, call out the ones that don’t “belong”. Sorry if you trigger on the sight of those boards. We spent a lot of long nights with them.