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January 8, 2004: The clumsily named Apple iPod + HP, a Hewlett-Packard-branded iPod, makes it debut on the Shopper Electronics Present in Las Vegas.
Proven off by Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, the prototype system is blue, the colour used for HP’s branding. By the point it arrives in the marketplace later that 12 months, nevertheless, the system is identical shade of white because the common iPod. It doesn’t dangle round for lengthy, both.
Apple + HP = Not a significant collaboration
On paper, the collaboration between Hewlett-Packard and Apple appeared to come back out of left area. There was, nevertheless, shared historical past between the 2 firms. As a child, Steve Jobs seemed up HP co-founder Invoice Hewlett within the telephone ebook. He wound up getting a summer time job on the firm. HP additionally employed Steve Wozniak throughout the time he labored on the Apple-1 and Apple II computer systems.
Over time, Apple recruited various high-performing people from HP, too. And HP maintained a campus in Cupertino till 2010, when it bought the land to Apple to construct Apple Park.
No matter these ties, the Apple iPod + HP by no means got here throughout like a significant collaboration between the 2 firms.
Jobs sometimes loathed licensing Apple know-how, which explains why he was by no means eager to port Mac OS to different techniques. He solely begrudgingly did this with the NeXTSTEP working system at NeXT. And he instantly canceled the licensed “clone Macs” when he returned to Apple within the late Nineteen Nineties.
The Apple iPod + HP marked the one time Jobs ever licensed the official iPod title to a different firm — though he did license iTunes to Motorola to create the first (type of) Apple telephone.
Steve Jobs’ good technique
By 2004, Jobs had backed down on his hard-line view that the iTunes Music Retailer ought to by no means be obtainable on a non-Mac pc. The service had expanded to Home windows PCs in late 2003, though HP was the one Home windows producer that bought its personal iPod variant.
As a part of the deal, iTunes got here preinstalled on all HP Pavilion and Compaq Presario computer systems. In concept, it was a win-win for each firms. HP bought a singular promoting level, whereas Apple might additional broaden its iTunes market. This gave iTunes a presence in locations like Walmart and RadioShack, the place Apple computer systems weren’t bought.
In reality, the HP iPod deal could have been a wise little bit of company jiu-jitsu on Apple’s half. In a 2015 Medium submit, titled “How Steve Jobs Fleeced Carly Fiorina,” journalist Steven Levy recommended that the transfer was a strategic one to dam HP from putting in Home windows Media Retailer on the businesses PCs. Whereas HP did certainly get an HP-branded iPod, quickly afterward Apple upgraded its personal iPod — thereby making HP’s model outdated. Levy writes:
Briefly, Fiorina’s “good buddy” Steve Jobs blithely mugged her and HP’s shareholders. By getting Fiorina to undertake the iPod as HP’s music participant, Jobs had successfully gotten his software program put in on hundreds of thousands of computer systems at no cost, stifled his most important competitor, and gotten an organization that prided itself on invention to declare that Apple was a superior inventor. And he misplaced nothing, besides the jiffy it took him to name Carly Fiorina and say he was sorry she bought canned.
Pulling the plug on the HP iPod
Finally, the deal did not ship the sort of gross sales figures HP hoped for. On July 29, 2005, HP terminated the deal, though the corporate was contractually obligated to put in iTunes on its computer systems till January 2006. A while later, it launched its personal Compaq audio participant, which did not make waves.
Do you keep in mind the Apple iPod + HP? Have been you first uncovered to iTunes via an HP pc? Tell us within the feedback under.
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