Tony Fadell, vice-président senior d'Apple de 2001 à 2010, en charge des équipes qui ont conçu l'iPod, ainsi que les trois premières générations d'iPhone – 01/04

In the fall of 2001, Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy, with less than one percent of the US computer market. Tony Fadell, then a freelance contractor, was asked to lead a secret project codenamed P-68. He hesitated to take the job because he wasn’t sure Apple would still exist in a year. That project became the iPod, and Fadell would go on to lead the teams that built the first three generations of the iPhone. Speaking on Tech&Co, la quotidienne for Apple’s 50th anniversary, Fadell walked through the near-death circumstances, the internal battles, and the accidental revolutions that defined the company’s most consequential decade.

The iPod: A product built under existential threat

The iPod was not born from ambition but from desperation. When Steve Jobs gave the green light in 2001, Apple’s entire revenue came from the Macintosh, which held less than one percent of the US computer market. Fadell’s team was tiny — about 30 to 40 people — and they had under ten months to ship a product from scratch before Christmas. Fadell recalls that he was unsure whether to join the project at all: “I didn’t even know if Apple was going to exist in a year.” The pressure came directly from Jobs, who supervised the project closely because it was the company’s only other product line.