Steve Jobs’ most Impulsive Decision

[@TorutheRedFox]

ｆｉｎｄ ｍｅ ｔｈｅ ｄｒｉｖｅ ｊｏｈｎ

[@austinfarley4971]

I died at this part.

[@MaJeeDooo0010]

5:58 for those wondering-

[@alejandroalzatesanchez]

6:35 **Obliterates the door** S T E V E I G O T I T! I've found the hard drive i just need a 10M dollars.

[@alejandroalzatesanchez]

*D O I T*

[@dasdoin9600]

good thing reddit wasnt a thing yet

[@RyugaHidekiOrRyuzaki]

This channel's transition into tech history has been amazing. Keep it up Alex

[@II_Gyros_II69]

And then comes the next Athlon3000G ;)

[@LoliconSamalik]

I still remember when he was trying to help people run Metal Gear on potatoes.

[@gammaphonic]

I do miss when this channel was all about getting cyberpunk to run on a graphing calculator.

[@MJ-uk6lu]

In a way it's blessing and a curse. He completely alienated his previous audience and went on long hiatus, but result of that is now refreshed channel with excellent more niche content. I think I like it now too, but I admit that I miss older content too.

[@typingcat1814]

I wouldn't say he alienates anybody. I came for his content, but I stayed for his style.

[@alexmcd378]

I worked at CompUSA when the color iMac came out. My reaction was very PC user disdain, because I was kind of an ass back then. But one coworker took it to another level. He figured the green model would look the worst in people's houses, so he secretly told customers the green ones were faster. And people believed him. :/

[@LowSpecGamer]

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOL.

[@cosmicrdt]

That's nonsense. Everyone knows red is faster.

[@alexmcd378]

@@cosmicrdt iChop. Slay different

[@tausiftaha12]

Ancient version of "RGB = Faster"

[@Kalvinjj]

@@cosmicrdt Blue runs cooler, red runs faster. Green is save the planed BS.

[@KantiDono]

"We have this tiny hard drive, but we have no idea what to use it for. Maybe you'd be interested?" "How much?" "Well, we're looking at pricing them for around $50, but maybe with some work we could bring the price down, and..." "No no, how much for _all_ of them."

[@TheXlen]

That's actually the story I've heard, no idea if it's true though

[@stormyandcold]

@@TheXlen Considering Apple bought almost all 5nm inventory; It's probably true.

[@tyaty]

Actually 1.8" hard drives were around since 1993. A 1.3" HDD was introduced in 1992. 1" Microdrives were released in 198/99.

[@Incommensurabilities]

@@tyaty Yeah I was wondering about microdrives too!

[@klausstock8020]

@@Incommensurabilities Microdrives had the issue that they could not run continuously. I think the design spec called for 25% of the time spinning, max, and only for rather short durations - definitely not ten hours in one go. One area of use were digital cameras, and these had buffer memory, so the drive did not have to spin continuously. I guess Apple wanted to go without a memory buffer - which they were then forced to add anyway.

[@alexmcd378]

He's right. The early mp3 player scene was a hot mess of janky low capacity and usually overpriced crap. I found a hybrid solution. It was a CD player with file system and mp3 decoder in firmware. So you could burn a huge (for the time) amount of music to a CD in mp3 format, and have a useful file structure for telling it to play only one album or one artist. It was also skip resistant. Fantastic device for the Era.

[@LowSpecGamer]

I think I had one of those too

[@Liam3072]

@@LowSpecGamer iRiver made quite a lot of those. If my memory is correct, they were called iMP-XXX where XXX is a number depending on the model. The higher end models had huge memory protection, read ogg vorbis files, and were super small and thin. iRiver also made one of the main iPod competitor, with the iHP series (H for Harddrive I'd wager).

[@anon_y_mousse]

I still have one of those. The 700mb discs were perfect to squeeze a few extra songs onto.

[@nickwallette6201]

They were still the fattest, clunkiest CD players you’ve ever seen (at least since the early 80s), and had terrible interfaces. I was very skeptical of all of it until I saw the iPod Video. My entire collection on the drive at once, a nice interface, and all-day battery. Finally! 👍

[@damienlobb85]

Creative had the right idea with their HDD and OS interface. Apple took the good ideas from them and executed them much better. Hence why Creative sued Apple over the iPod interface when Apple tried to sue them over the Zen players.

[@shapesinaframe]

Fun fact: the FireWire connector design came from the Nintendo Gameboy link cable as it was proven to be resilient to withstand regular connections/disconnections with rough handling 😊

[@elimendoza900]

Oh, so I wasn't being wildly imaginative

[@trashyraccoon2615]

@@PotatoeSnowCreativity has always been about taking things from various places and combining them into something that is your own, which is exactly what Apple and Jobs did. Also, Jobs licensed the GUI from Xerox, he never “stole” it lol

[@ProjectDv2]

​@PotatoeSnow you don't have a strong conception of what "stealing" is. That implies he took technologies that weren't his to take, without permission of those he took them from. He took existing ideas and technologies and expanded upon them. That's literally the essence of innovation. And that was what Jobs was good at, looking at something and recognizing its untapped potential and tapping into it in a meaningful way.

[@schweepy_g]

I remember working on early mobile iPod/iPhone apps for my company and we had Apple tech support available to us for onsite visits. On one visit I asked them what is Steve like had they ever just talked to him. They all nervously burst out laughing like this question was soo alien to them, saying, 'Oh you never talk to Steve. You don't even look at him and you always hope he never talks to you and if you do you hope it's good because if not you might get fired on the spot for saying the wrong thing or him just being in the wrong mood at the time, but he never just walked around he was always headed straight for where he needed to go and that was always someone's desk.' Very eye-opening description of the man.

[@NeroVingian40]

Most people that talk about Steve Jobs today, only talk about what he has done in regards to the various tech industries that he has dipped his toes into. What we almost never talked about what how the guy really was to work with, what his personality really is.

[@jimtekkit]

Not exactly the kind of coworker who you'd meet up at the pub with after work hours. Credit where credit is due he made his name as a visionary businessman but he became a borderline psychopath to make it happen.

[@trashtrash2169]

You do what is required. The ipod was nearly perfection.

[@TheEviltaco666]

Technology would not be what it is today if he wasn’t a borderline psychopath, and whether that’s a good thing or not is up for debate

[@WellBattle6]

@@NeroVingian40 If you search up Working with Steve Jobs on KZbin or similar most of them talk about how scary he was to work for.

[@philtkaswahl2124]

This channel is rapidly becoming one of my favorite tech history channels. The illustrations, in particular, give the vids a unique flavor.

[@RockOrso2]

So LowSpecGamer transitioned to gaming on low specs to having low-specs to cover the most important thing we've forgotten as a community, the history of technology before that served as the foundation of today's tech.

[@OrangeManGood2024]

Kamala?

[@Nnda8731]

Apple got the last laugh. When the Xbox 360 was in development, all the engineers had to use PowerPC Macs 🤣

[@JeffreyPiatt]

The Dev kits for the 360 were power pc Macs modded to run a newer version of Windows NT for PPC the last retail pc build was 4.0 . the 360 had a port of Windows 7 for PPC NT 6.1. I believe the devkits had both Macos and the Windows 7 Xbox is on them.

[@scott6605]

@@JeffreyPiatt Win 7 didn’t come out until 2009 though

[@Valery0p5]

iirc window's xp gui was designed on a mac

[@SlippiSRC]

@@JeffreyPiattI think it was Windows XP or early version of Window Vista

[@Fennecbutt]

Idk Microsoft had a good laugh when Bill Gates bailed Apple out.

[@elemaire86]

All I know is, I now want a Steve Jobs anime that focuses on his eccentricities and ridiculous yet ground breaking requests and expectations depicted in the most hilarious and dramatic way possible. Do it!

[@Alley-dw2fl]

That also leads to him using homeopathic medicine over actually treating a treatable pancreatic tumor. That eccentric thinking is why he died at 53. He was a dreamer, but it's engineers that brought his ideas to reality. Jobs was the most impressive scamner there ever was.

[@revemb4653]

He was no scammer@@Alley-dw2fl

[@kickin_ass]

make me the anime, john

[@Molomar1]

Due to his almost religious like view for the book that lead to his diet, jobs often didn’t shower back in the day. People who worked often complained to him about it, but he just got mad like it was their problem.

[@The_original_Silu]

Maybe just regular animation, an anime would be unbearable

[@DanCreaMundos]

Glad to see some content about Steve jobs, he has quite a history and was a very peculiar person in many good and bad ways

[@leprechaunbutreallyjustamidget]

He was definitely a narcissistic douchebag and the company as a whole isn't any better

[@WigWoo1]

Holy Hell dude I gotta say when I heard that Steve Jobs voice you hired someone to do I went "Whoa" I really love hearing this video with custom voices, and you did a phenomenal job finding some good ones. I love how Stern and passionate in rage Steve was, but sounded calmly professional at the same time, if that makes sense

[@LowSpecGamer]

Only one I did not hire was Steve Jobs, I brought a guest for that: the youtuber Patrick Willems. He did an excellent job.

[@WigWoo1]

@@LowSpecGamer Yes he did. Fantastic to know the others were actually them!

[@JaseNeverSleeps]

You really said "whoa"?? That's incredible

[@WigWoo1]

@@JaseNeverSleeps as soon as I heard it I just couldn't believe how great it matched. I didn't even know the other people were actually the real people either. So that just adds icing on top of the cake

[@GriffinLymburn]

@@WigWoo1 You might enjoy Patrick H Willem's channel, I highly recommend it. I've been watching his videos for years- top notch work. The respect Willems has garnered from the filmmaking community (and KZbin as well) is very well deserved. Even David Fincher will cameo in his next short film!

[@tonychesser8710]

I remember reading some article where the author talked about observing someone with an iPod walking into a store, connecting to a Mac being displayed, copying some application over to the hard drive on their iPod, then disconnecting and walking out of the store. Did they succeed in copying the app for their system at home? Unknown. But ... connect ... drag and drop ... seconds pass ... disconnect ... walk off with a pile of data ... eminently do-able. FireWire was able to handle about 400 Mbits at that time and, unlike USB, many interfaces could actually get real-world transfer rates pretty close to the max theoretical of 50 MB / sec. That's kinda important if you're trying to transfer digital video off your camcorder to your Mac. If your iPod could cache incoming data over to the 32 MB of RAM on its way to getting onto the hard drive, you could fill that space in less than a second. Even 1 GB of data wouldn't take long; the hard drive interface would be the bottleneck. So I expect it would be VERY easy to use such a device for espionage.

[@iRelevant.47.system.boycott]

Great. The iPhone should be ultra secure I guess.

[@johntheblindman]

If the copied application didn't require a serial key then yes the App will run. Installers for OS X was just old software companies like Adobe and MS. Also unlike USB 1.0, Firewire wasn't bound by the CPU.

[@D1EHARDTOO]

Love the production quality as always! This was my first time checking the description and I'm so glad I did, to realize throwing the iPod prototype into the aquarium was real!

[@LowSpecGamer]

Oh that story was too wild for me to make up

[@nitrosherbert888]

@@LowSpecGamer Was it word to word I could've sworn it was phrased differently?

[@joaomarcelobadu]

WHAT-A-VIDEO! . I Watched it twice in a row to enjoy the quality of your production, from the text to the sound mixing. 10/10! Congrats, you deserve an award!

[@BrendanWeibrecht]

All this lesser-known tech history is fascinating and really well-told. This is now one of my favourite channels!

[@niZmosis]

I fucking love when the characters kick in the doors in these videos lol.

[@HaakonAnderson]

His most impulsive decision was trying to treat cancer with juice.

[@starcrashr]

Some impulsive medical decisions have won awards. That one happened to win a Darwin Award.

[@chadkowalski5517]

Comment of the year. I mean, why not listen to doctors to cure your completely curable cancer? Nice work, Steve. You've left your family without a father, grandfather, and asshole. Meanwhile, ol' Billy Gate is still alive and well😂

[@MrQuartzable]

He could have lived longer if he did the operation according to doctors however his hipster side decided juice and fruits are the answer.. at the end when it was out of control he agreed to undergo the procedure yet it was too late.

[@SpecialProjectY]

Also, not accepting his daughter even if genetic evidence proved she was his ..

[@OrangeManGood2024]

Morbid...I LIKE IT.

[@ashamaniq]

Steve kicking down the door is probably one of the most accurate representations of him 😂

[@liberty-matrix]

Steve Jobs’ most impulsive decision was when his neighbors had a party and everyone was looking over his backyard fence so he bought their house and bulldoze it flat for privacy.

[@zaidlacksalastname4905]

With this shift in content, you answered what other youtubers worry about, which is "do they watch for the content or for me?". Shifting from making games run on low end pcs to tech history documentaries while retaining your old fans and making new ones shows that people will follow you on whatever you love, and that's something to be proud of. Well done!

[@gabemcguire2463]

It's so cool to hear Fadell's name because one of my professors worked with him on Google Glass and has brought him up a few times in lecture

[@edward9674]

Love how your channel has expanded its content so much over the years!

[@otter-pro]

When I got to try the original 1st gen ipod for the first time at an electronics store, I was mind-blown by the little device. I saw the white case and the screen and click wheel up close and it was so beautifully made. The UI was something I've never seen before, and the click wheel felt so tactile and intuitive and fun to use. I couldn't afford it and I settled for a cheap mp3 player with tiny storage of 10 mp3s back then, but I still remember it to this day.

[@echelonrank3927]

i had some burnt mp3 discs for my mp3 capable cd player. 700 MB storage per disc. everything was going fine until i tried switching to ipod mini . when i plugged it in, it immediately SPAMMED me to update the computers operating system. when i tried to transfer music nothing worked. i eventually did the update, but the system crashed and there was a series of error messages. apple informed me the new operating system cannot run on macs more than 2 years old. i couldnt afford a new mac, i almost cried. rest in turmoil steve jobs.

[@anon_y_mousse]

Seeing the amount and quality of CGI and hand drawn animation that went into this, it's no wonder it takes so long between videos. I don't know how long you'll be able to keep this up, but I'll enjoy the ride.

[@LowSpecGamer]

I am trying very hard to build a system that is sustainable, and with different people in team tackling a different aspect of it (3D to Art) we are getting there. If you want to help us out in the path to sustainability Nebula is definitely the way to go

[@Nafeels]

The iPod was just as revolutionary as the Walkman, even though iTunes was kind of shit. You’d definitely someone affluent if you own an iPod back then. Great video, Alex! Was expecting a DankPods cameo in this, since portable media players and iPods are undoubtedly his forte. Edit: I see what you did there at 14:36. Sneaky.

[@nessesitoburrito8873]

Either affluent or ghetto I remember those times. Obviously the ghetto kid would steal it off the wealthy kid.

[@themightiness]

idk why they weren't more popular but just before the ipod was released I bought a CD player that could play MP3s from a burned CD, so you could get a couple hundred songs on a 700MB CD. It was great and it was less than 100 bucks back in 2000ish. Never heard anybody else talk about them but it definitely kept me going until I could afford an ipod a few years later.

[@RetroTinkerer]

So it's starting to seems to me that the real genius of Jobs was not only to start pushing exceptional talented people like Wozniak to the edge and keep them there until his vision was realized but he apparently knew when it was mostly reasonable to start pushing.

[@Fennecbutt]

And backstab everyone, and throw child like tantrums when he didn't get his way. Like when he lied about how much they got paid when Wozniak helped reduce the number of chips in an arcade cabinet, Jobs (who did nothing to help because he was technically incompetent) took most of the money and gave woz a small sum. Or when woz left apple to do his own thing and jobs was furious (how dare u leave daddy), Woz invented the world's first universal remote and sent one to jobs, who threw it at the wall and broke it in a fit of anger as he was prone to. Jobs wasn't a genius, he was a showman, a con artist, he could wear a suit and tie and blend in with the rest of the CEO and executive types, that was his only skill.

[@sfdntk]

@@Fennecbutt Don't be such a whiny baby. Jobs was unquestionably a genius, you'd have to be a stone cold moron to think otherwise, not even his worst enemies thought he was anything less than one of the greatest innovators and designers in human history. Apple revolutionised multiple industries under his guidance, and it was his deep and intuitive understanding of human behaviour and design processes, along with his uncanny ability to get exactly the right people into exactly the right places and motivate them in exactly the right way to bring his visions to reality, that produced those results. Go and see what Woz himself has to say about Jobs, the undying admiration he has for his former partner, and then maybe spend ten minutes actually educating yourself on this subject so you don't embarrass yourself like this in the future.

[@thecapitalg]

​@@FennecbuttHe literally still made Apple as successful as it is today, without him there would've been none of the innovation that ended up becoming mainstream, and this is something coming from someone who doesn't even like Apple.

[@brittneyking4284]

@@sfdntkpeople love to rewrite history that they probably barely know and definitely didn’t have any hand in making lol

[@garycabezas]

Great job Alex! I never know what to expect next. History of Nintendo, Intel Chips, iPod! Nicely done. Love the content, and all of the side quests too. Keep it up!

[@arifhafeez6795]

Congratulations for 1M subs in advance

[@ElNeroDiablo]

Steve just *tossed the prototype in a fishtank* to see if there was still space inside by air leaking out?! Considering how tightly packed that prototype would have been it's a minor miracle they managed to make the finished device even smaller without high risk of things like wires and flat-flex cables breaking from bends being too dang tight!

[@LowSpecGamer]

He... had a particular way of doing things. Every direct source I can find on his methods for making a point have some wild story attached to them.

[@s3vR3x]

Great video! I love your videos and the thoroughness you tell these stories. You are one of the KZbinrs I look forward to most when a new video drops!! A couple corrections. Toshibas hard drive was not the smallest. The smallest hard drive up until that point was developed by HP called the HP kitty hawk and it was released in 1992 or 1993. It only held 40 megabytes, but it was the size of a matchbox. Also the nomad jukebox was intentionally sized like a CD player on purpose so it looked like portable CD players of the time. The Hard drive was a 2.5” laptop drive. The jukebox had closer to a 4 hour battery life, not 1 hour. And you could swap the batteries and keep going. I toured Europe with one! They could have potentially designed it to be smaller…there did exist other hard drive based mo3 at the time that were much smaller than the jukebox, using 2.5” laptop hard drives. Like the archos jukebox. These were much closer in size to the original iPod but they were much jankier. Anyway great video!

[@seanmolincreative]

Thank you for clearing up some of the misinformation about the NOMAD Jukebox. I had both the original and the follow up version 2. I loved those things so much. They were actually very well-received and loved. They were not hard to use and actually had a lot of great features the iPod didn't adopt until later (or really never did). And yes, the battery life was usually just over 4 hours - and of course it was just AAs so you could just throw more in any time.

[@s3vR3x]

@@seanmolincreative totally agree. I recently pulled my jukebox out and started using it. the interface was really well thought out and it had a ton of cool features, like 2 channel recording.

[@superspak]

Wow this is an amazing bit of tech history I never knew about. You can just tell that apple was in their prime of engineering/innovation at that time. The way they used the big memory buffer to extend the battery life was awesome. Looking forward to other videos like this.

[@damienlobb85]

I remember Creative and their MP3 players. By far the most elegant solution outside of the iPod. I had a Zen Vision M and absolutely loved it!

[@kizziezizzler8080]

fantastic illustrations. thank you so much!

[@TheLionAndTheLamb777]

I had a teacher that got to meet Steve Jobs. He had spoken endlessly about how great Jobs was before he met him. After he met him he said, "He was kind of a big jerk". This was in the late 90's in the pre iPhone era. People often are not how they seem in our expectations.

[@GyroCannon]

The fact that they decided to add a huge memory buffer shows commitment, because that definitely adds cost But at the same time, extra cost for so much more value, like hitting their battery life requirement AND skip protection. Love or hate them, that is the Apple magic that you see on their revolutionary products. I myself use an M1 MacBook for use away from home, ironically also because of insane battery life

[@ischmidt]

They weren't really concerned about cost then. Jobs insisted they use audiophile-grade DACs (I think Burr-Brown chips) and amplifiers in the iPod and even the eventually the iPhone / iPod Touch. That led to the iPods supporting lossless audio codecs so you could take full advantage of the sound quality.

[@AltaVistaReserv]

You are one of the best gaming/hardware historians on the whole KZbin! Style, deep dives in theme, real interviews, I bet you channel will grow big in no time, keep going ❤

[@emmyw6587]

Really enjoying these videos, great work from everyone who contributed I love the artwork!

[@trevinodude]

Idk what I love more about the art in this video… the style, that one picture where the Apple employee had an idea and Steve points at him like “That is GENIUS!!” or the running joke of Steve constantly jump kicking John’s door. 😂😂 This video is really great all around.

[@janusu]

That was way too entertaining. I had no choice but to subscribe. Great content!

[@Valery0p5]

This channel is going to make me fail my exams. There might have been a lot of unfair competition back then, but those first steps were really the hardest ones. As a 2000 kid I have experienced this stuff very late, but these products always felt kinda magical...

[@Titanicus2]

Really enjoyed this. What a great idea to do the tech history thing now games are going boring and not allowing you to low spec them as much. Definatly looking forward to what you have next.

[@sffpcmaniac]

This just completed my Sunday. Thank you lowspecgamer!

[@robertbreedlovecraft]

If you do another Apple episode, you gotta get DankPods...even if the role isn't Australia

[@Dremekeks]

The animation and voices in this were hilarious. Subbed.

[@HassanKhan0987]

Like many others I enjoyed your old content but damn man you're transition into tech history content has been smooth. Props and keep up the great work man

[@enilenis]

Rio PMP300 - my first MP3 player. It was great. Served me until the battery cover snapped off. Loved that little machine. All day runtime on a single AA. Nothing could match that. Only thing that sucked was the cost of flash media.

[@Fridge_Fiend]

Oh wow your channel has completly changed and I'm not even mad, this is good content. Shame you deleted all your old stuff though

[@LowSpecGamer]

It's all unlisted in a playlist

[@Fridge_Fiend]

@@LowSpecGamer based

[@spaceowl5957]

Amazing video! The storytelling was captivating and the drawings were so cute. It was a joy to watch. Thank you for making it.

[@itsthem5699]

FYI it's not "Steve Job's most impulsive decision", it's "Steve Jobs' most impulsive decision".

[@staledorito]

the art, presentation and story was gorgeous!! have found a new favorite channel

[@TheXlen]

Technically, the mp3 scene was failing because they were competing against PDAs that had expansion cards and flash storage that was there anyways, so in a way if the iPod had came out later it might have failed completely because something like P800 was right around the corner, anyways still as always great video and even a tech nerd like me got to find out some new things

[@stevethepocket]

So Apple ended up delaying the very palmtop revolution that they later took the credit for starting? That's hilarious. I do remember wondering, years before the iPhone, why there wasn't already a PocketPC type device with enough space for music and video and also a cellular modem that can access the internet-to the point where, when the iPhone did finally launch, it took me a while to understand why it was a big deal. (The secret was multitouch and a browser that could just display desktop sites at a time when designing for mobile was something almost zero webmasters were bothering to do.)

[@TheXlen]

@@stevethepocket the only thing Apple actually brought to the market at the time was true multitouch, everything else existed before and well Sony Ericsson P800 is the device you should probably attribute as the beginning of the true smartphone as we understand it today

[@earthling_parth]

Wow, you are amazing at documenting tech history. Amazing work on transitioning the channel. I'm off to Nebula now to see the side quest video. Again, congratulations Alex 👏

[@BubblegumCrash332]

A bunch of nameless and faceless engineers create everything at Apple and Steve Jobs walks out on stage like he is Jesus as if he created everything himself

[@LowSpecGamer]

Well at least I am trying to name a few here

[@DanaTheInsane]

His drive and direction focused them. The first Apple computer was going to be just a homebrew for a computer club. Jobs had a focus, an esthetic. he knew how to make what people wanted before they want it, in a way that made everything else look clunky and sloppy by comparison. Her was the driving force. he worked those teams, he made things happen. He did plenty.

[@johntheblindman]

Yeah except that more people know about these engineers from Apple than those from other companies.

[@raxxmoriti]

This has been my favourite channel so far, learning about the history behind the Tech woow

[@seanmcmaster4856]

Love the new direction for the channel! You have true talent and any topic you choose will be a great one!

[@xirtus]

that's not exactly how it happened but not bad. I think you mean scott. Scott Forstall.

[@LowSpecGamer]

I might my internal timeline wrong, but usually I see Forstall name pop up later on the iPhone. If you have other sources that you can link on the iPod story please do. I used the sources in the description and tried to build the best timeline possible while simplifying for the format.

[@xirtus]

​@@LowSpecGamerThe fact that he is remembered for tim cook's iphone apple maps travesty is the ET game fiasco of our times. Scott worked at NeXT and came along, invented isync and aqua and safari, always worked on christmas. .he also redesigned imove on a vacation one time, intense and cool guy. I am fairly certain that it was Scott who first suggested whatever triggered Steve to do it, although you listed the most influential: the Nomad Jukebox, that thing REALLY upset Steve. Your doc is really good, I'm glad you got some stuff about Soundjam. Bill (Kinkaid) is a brilliant and funny guy, he would probably talk to you. I'd love to hear something on sun ni's law and microkernel rtos sometime but that's an aside.

[@LowSpecGamer]

Did you have any direct contact with him? I am always on the hunt for primary and secondary sources and would love to conform is he was the one that made the suggestion that triggered this whole thing.

[@Albee213]

I still use my Zune. Still one of the best sounding MP3 players I have used. Cant believe its almost 20 years old and it works great, even the battery life is good.

[@Dbdb00-i7q]

Great video!! Couple of little things: Steve was fired in 1985 - and the Next deal was end of 1996. The Bondi Blue iMacs in 1998 didn't have firewire..The iPod came 3 years later. The 'Digital Hub' strategy came later: 2000. As for Steve's most impulsive decision on the iPod project: I always thought it was removing the on/off switch in late development ;)

[@TheWerewolfJesus]

The Diamond Rio takes me back. I had a Rio 600 back in the day, it was mind-blowing. If you resampled your MP3s down to 92kb/s, you could fit maybe twenty songs on there, and the sound quality wasn't too bad. Then a few years later the iPod Mini came along with 4 gigabytes and it felt like infinite space.

[@CIAVERMONT]

@1:39 when you point at "FireWire Ports" your arrow is actually pointing at the USB ports. The firewire ports are next to the USB, and your render only shows a single Firewire port, there were 2. Also the Bondi iMac never had firewire. The first iMac to have firewire was actually the 3rd generation iMacs, the iMac DV and iMac DV SE which were not available in the colors shown in your video.

[@m3m3sis]

Props to the artist doing the illustrations!

[@mylogify]

Obviously not so much lowspec gamer, rather highspec gamer

[@AmusedWalrus]

Man, I just want to say I absolutely love your channel and these tech history videos. It is such a good series.

[@Gadgetman1989]

Man I love watching these deep dives into tech. Would you ever do a video chronicling the history of Nokia and their flagship N900? To me that phone is by far one of the best phones ever created because it incorporated both Linux, Android, and a open source software that is now the norm (in a way) for Android app creators

[@Dysphoricsmile]

I wanted a Nomad Jukebox, but I later goes a NEUROS - which was 20 GB, backlit, had FM Radio output and a much sleeker design that could just fit into the pockets of 00's jeans. I LOVED the FM radio output, and I loved that unit, I used it till around 2010 when I lost it. You could be in ANY car with a radio and get broadcast quality stereo music with ease! It had a ton of features, the only ones I really used were the FM radio output and the playlist function. It had AM/FM in too of course.

[@Dedicated2WendyWilliams]

I love these anime clips.. your next level with doing this!! Very visually appealing compared to other talking with pictures keep it up

[@marci1380]

I started watching you when I needed help with my old shoddy PC because I wanted to game, now that I no longer need help with such matters, I am loving this change to tech history. They are both very entertaining and funny, but it is also very informative and interesting! They should teach like this in schools to be honest :D Keep up the good work!

[@thoreberlin]

That bubbles coming out of the device story is a meme older than the ipod. It was formaly adhered to a camera maker.

[@MyProjectBoxChannel]

Everybody's forgetting about the Archos MP3 player (hard drive based) . It was much smaller than the nomad, only barely bigger than the hard drive itself. You could upgrade the hard drive to any size you liked, yourself with a standard laptop hard drive. There was no limitation to copying, to and from and sharing from the device like the Apple iPod did. It came out long before the Apple iPod did in my opinion was far superior. People wrote custom firmware for it. You could replace the batteries yourself. You could use it as an external hard drive. No special software was required to use it. It was just a fantastic product all around.

[@gehteuchnichtsan7911]

yooo the illustrations are so awesome. thanks to everyone involved in this video. thank you so much for all the work.

[@harrylane4]

I love how many massive tech ideas started with someone kicking down an office door

[@Rennu_the_linux_guy]

Man these videos are awesome, I love the illustrations and visuals and the music

[@leenasawdekar9339]

So very well created and narrated. Thanks a lot

[@_TeddyCore]

Just wanted to let you know, I’ve been on the fence about Nebula for a while now and discovering this video is what finally tipped me over to give the service a try. Great video, fantastic narration and style. Much love ❤️

[@LowSpecGamer]

Thank you!

[@dalton5229]

I really love your new channel format. Each of these historical videos are awesome!

[@MoatenGat]

You create outstanding videos. So much information and artwork, fabulous. I am always waiting in anticipation for your next video. Thank you.

[@thiekus]

Fun fact: the company that make Audion (Panic, Inc.) has lengthy but interesting retrospective story about Apple negotiation in their blog (search for "true story of audion"). Apple bought SoundJam instead as basis of iTunes due to Panic in negotiation by AOL, the giant who also bought Winamp. Glad that Panic still doing bussiness well today.

[@LowSpecGamer]

YES! I had to cut this part out to keep the video flowing better but it is an interesting story for sure.

[@stevethepocket]

That microdrive monopoly lasted a while, too; my only dedicated MP3 player (that works) is a Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra (yes, all that is the name) from 2004 that still uses a laptop drive. On the upside, when it fell off the top shelf of my desk and had a head crash, I was able to just swap out the drive for one out of an actual laptop and keep on trucking. Hypothetically I could have found a bigger one and upgraded its capacity, but I was nowhere close to needing to.

[@seanmolincreative]

I love that you mentioned the NOMAD Jukebox, but there's some misinformation in the video. I had both the original and the follow up version 2. I loved those things so much. They were actually very well-received and loved. The interface was more than adequate and was not hard to use and actually had a lot of great features the iPod didn't adopt until later (or really never did - I'm looking at you graphic EQ). And the DAC was very good and definitely better than the iPods for many generations - a major reason many of us audio nerds were resistant to iPods for so long. In addition to multi-band EQ, they also had spatialization control. And the battery life was usually just over 4 hours (up to 20 hours with the Jukebox 2 with the 2nd battery slot in use) - and of course it was just AAs so you could just throw more in any time. The Jukebox was really a quantum leap forward from everything else that existed at the time. They were $499 on release in September of 2000, but quickly dropped to $269 just 6 months later which is when I got mine. I remember taking mine on a school band trip loaded up with 600 songs and I was the talk of the entire trip. Most my friends were lugging around binders of CDs still. A couple friends had Diamond Rio MP3 players, but they held only 1-2 albums.

[@Mekchanoid]

Very enjoyable, although I think you seriously misrepresent what MP3 players were like before the iPod. They were incredibly simple to use and affordable mainly because they didn't contain an entire music collection on them. For most people a choice of 10 albums was quite enough. There was none of the frustration of endless menu scrolling. While the iPod was stunning, just in a league of its own in design, they were physically smaller and lighter - you could clip one to your collar instead of needing a thick armband. There was a big choice of form factors. The iPod was expensive but good value - it cost four times more than the competition but could hold orders of magnitude more music. But for anyone who ripped their CD collection and managed it using their OS, trading the flexibility of WIMPS-based file management for the spreadsheet rigidity of iTunes semeed like a big step backwards. I still don't carry my entire music collection with me, even though phone storage these days makes music libraries look relatively small. And finally, they were powered by replaceable consumer batteries and many continue to work (Apple devices are for the bin once the battery has reached the end of its life). If anyone would like a 128Mb mp3 player please let me know!

[@MrMetropolis]

You did NOT just hide Cbat in the ipod screen...

[@Dysphoricsmile]

My Brother (rest in Peace) had a RIO PMP-300 with a 32 MB Smart card for 64 MB of memory. I ended up getting the "Cabo" music player, smaller than a deck of cards and thinner, not only did it display track names unlike the RIO, but it also had 64 MB on board and accepted 128 MB Smart cards, which I bought one. That was middleschool for me, so around year 2000!

[@joez.2794]

I was involved in an early 2000's project that involved recording hours-long mock trials from multiple cameras. Memory cards, tapes, etc. weren't really an option. Firewire directly to from the camera to the hard drive saved the day.

[@Jolis_Parsec]

I still have my old iPod (it was one of the later revisions of what would become known as the Classic series), though the device itself is pretty much done for and won’t turn on these days due to how much I used it on a regular basis. It’s still worth holding onto for the sentimental value alone, though I’d love to get it repaired and working again one day for old time’s sake.

[@zeroyuki92]

Unlike a lot people here, I just discovered this channel yesterday. Very surprised by (current) low-ish viewcount, but the production quality for your videos are top notch! This channel will grow to be a much bigger channel, I'm sure!

[@DanaTheInsane]

I still have a Gen 5 iPod classic, pulled the drive, jammed in a block of flash, a huge battery. Its still great.

[@tipalash3722]

i knew that i heard this voice before. I used to watch your videos when I had a crappy computer, your videos helped me play games that i could never before. altho the experience of the game was bad, to say the least, it helped me make some good memories.

[@guillaumefigarella1704]

So that was amazing Alex, thank you for the hard work!

[@RoweGames-w8t]

Was not expecting a Patrick Willems cameo but 10/10

[@johnnyc.31]

I had an MP3 player w/ FM tuner & recorder, called DigitalWay MPiO. It ran a 256 MB flash on a single AAA battery + took SD cards, but SDs were only 16 or 32 MB back then 😅

[@danielwoods7325]

great video! Man I remember my ipod nano, that thing changed my life

[@Crabiani]

Patrick H Willems as Steve Jobs hits hard

[@71bw]

Great book about Wrocław you’ve got lying there… also, great video. Love the new style of content.

[@dylanxitton]

Absolutely LOVED this video, I enjoy your narrative and the animations, just mind blowing!! Un saludo de tu suscriptor de habla hispana :D

[@ArchLars]

Programming for Jobs must have felt like how engineers feel when they read architectural plans.

[@oriolgonzalez9328]

You may be the LowSpecGamer, bit these tech documentaries can only be described as top spec, excellent job Alex!

[@jammi__]

Firewire didn't come in iMacs until the fourth revision and second generation, which was completely re-engineered and commonly called iMac DV, yet even there it was reserved for the higher-spec models. Power Macs however received Firewire half a year after the introduction of the iMac in the short-lived PowerMac G3 Blue & White model, which introduced the new case design used in the PowerMac G4.