By Steven Levy (2007)

Pages: 286, Final verdict: Great-read

If you’ve ever owned one, you know: the iPod was special.

From 2001 to 2022, Apple sold more than 450 million of them. Along the way, it morphed from a music player into a social phenomenon. If you had one, you were cool. If you didn’t—well, I’m sorry for you.

Steven Levy was the perfect person to tell the iPod story. As I mentioned in the review of The Inside Story (Steven's book on the history of Facebook), "Steven Levy is what you might call an OG tech journalist.". Apart from being a prolific tech writer, Levy’s work for Newsweek in the early 2000s gave him "as much access as any Apple outsider could ever get."

The Perfect Thing covers the five-year era between 2001 and 2007, when your coolness was measured by the length of your iTunes playlist queue and the obscurity of the bands in it. The book is divided into 10 chapters, structured in its own "shuffle mode." Aside from the introduction, you can read them in any order, with each chapter telling the iPod story from a different angle.

"But after that, just like the playlist or whole music library when the iPod’s shuffle menu is selected, the other eight chapters would be mixed—and mixed several times—to create several “shuffles” of the book. The book you are holding in your hand may be ordered differently from someone else’s copy" - Steven Levy

As odd as it sounds today, in 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple as interim CEO (iCEO), the Cupertino company was not known for small computing devices. Apple was the company of the Apple II, the Macintosh, and the big Mac towers—the Power Macs. But in just a few years, everything would turn upside down. By 2005, iPod sales represented over 30% of Apple’s revenue. It paved the way for the iPhone and transformed Apple entirely.

But as Levy argues in The Perfect Thing, the fact that a music player would drive that turnaround was anything but likely.

  • Apple had no track record in the music business.
  • The digital music industry was a mess. The explosion of music piracy, spearheaded by Napster, had put the industry on the defensive.
  • Apple itself was near bankruptcy, with estimates suggesting it had only 90 days' worth of cash to keep operations running. In a now-infamous quote, Michael Dell was asked what he would do if he were in charge of Apple. "What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

All of this made it seem implausible for Apple to create a winning product—a small computing device in an industry it didn’t know, in a market extremely skeptical of digital technology.

And yet, that’s where the "perfect" in The Perfect Thing comes in: a "perfect storm." As unlikely as it seemed, everything came together to put Apple in the perfect place to invent the iPod. For one thing, Apple was struggling, and with Jobs back, they were more willing to take risks. Also, the market for digital music players was appallingly bad. Sony had dominated the 1980s and early 1990s with the Walkman, selling over 400 million units, but digital music (MP3) players that followed were unremarkable—most looked like USB sticks, barely held 30 songs, and had unusable elongated screens.

A crucial part of the iPod project was how Jon Rubinstein struck a deal with Toshiba to get Apple access to their new 1.8-inch hard drive. This, combined with a new MP3 codec, made it theoretically possible to store 1,000 songs on a small device. The iPod wasn’t the first digital music player to feature a hard drive—that distinction belongs to the PJB, a player created by DEC's research lab and discontinued after Compaq’s merger—but it was the first one that people actually used and loved.

Unsurprisingly, Levy walks us through the process of building that first iPod: assembling the team, sourcing the right suppliers, acquiring SoundJam (which became iTunes), and the many technical innovations necessary to bring the iPod to life.

The timeline of iPod development is extraordinary:

  • March 2001: Apple officially begins iPod development.
  • April 2001: Apple finds a contract manufacturer.
  • July 2001: The first prototype is completed.
  • October 2001: Apple announces the iPod at a press event.
  • November 2001: The iPod goes on sale in the U.S., exclusively for Mac users.
  • July 2002: Apple introduces the second-generation iPod, with larger storage capacities (10 GB and 20 GB) and a touch-sensitive wheel.
  • October 2002: The third-generation iPod is launched, compatible with both Mac and Windows PCs.
  • April 2003: Apple launches the iTunes Store for Mac.
  • October 2003: Apple releases iTunes for Windows.

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The iPod was a "just-in-time-to-save-Apple" type of product. It marked the beginning of a new era for the company, especially after the release of iTunes for Windows and the Music Store.

The iTunes Music Store alone could warrant its own book, and I wish Levy had spent more time on it. In its first week, users bought more than a million songs—more than had been legally downloaded in all of history. And this was only from the fraction of Mac users who had iPods and took the trouble to download from the iTunes Store.

Now that streaming music is ubiquitous, it feels strange to remember a time when we bought individual songs, and when our music collections were constrained to multiples of 99 cents. But The Perfect Thing gives you a deep appreciation for how incredible it was that Steve Jobs and his team convinced the major record labels to trust them on a project that defied their business models—selling $18 CDs with two good songs and a bunch of fillers. It seemed like a perfect medium for piracy, but it wasn’t.

By the end of 2005, Apple Computer had sold more than 42 million iPods, at prices ranging from $99 to $599 (most sold in the middle range). What’s more, at that time the iPod had about 75 percent market share of the entire category of digital music players. Its online digital music emporium, the iTunes Music Store, has sold more than a billion songs at 99 cents each, representing about 85 percent of all legal paid downloads, a market that barely existed before Steve Jobs herded the nasty cats running record labels and got them to agree to his way of selling music.

Bottom Line

The Perfect Thing will make you nostalgic. For many of us, the iPod was a product of our teenage years, and hearing the behind-the-scenes stories will take you back to your own memories (and playlists). Plus, Levy is a great storyteller—one of my go-to authors for the early days of computing and the web.

Levy does go on a bit of a tangent at times, like the unnecessarily long section on shuffle mode. Apparently, "almost no one believed that random shuffle was random," and Levy spends a tenth of the book discussing customers' paranoid reports, his own doubts, and the psychology behind the shuffle, explaining how it was all a case of clustering illusion.

In the end, if you loved the iPod and enjoy books about technology, you’ll love this one. The iPod might not have been perfect, but it was a beautifully designed music player that reshaped the music industry, helped save Apple from the brink of extinction, and solidified Steve Jobs' legacy.

Further learning: