January 8, 2004: The clumsily named iPod+HP, a Hewlett-Packard-branded iPod, debuts on the Client Electronics Present in Las Vegas.
Proven off by Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, the prototype machine is blue, the colour used for HP’s branding. By the point it arrives available on the market later that 12 months, nonetheless, the digital music participant is similar shade of white because the common iPod. The machine doesn’t dangle round for lengthy, both.
Apple iPod+HP = Not a significant collaboration
On paper, the collaboration between Hewlett-Packard and Apple appeared to return out of left subject. There was, nonetheless, a shared historical past between the 2 corporations. As a child, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs regarded up HP co-founder Invoice Hewlett within the telephone guide. He wound up getting a summer time job on the firm. HP additionally employed Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in the course of the time he labored on the Apple-1 and Apple II computer systems.
Over time, Apple recruited a number of high-performing people from HP, too. And HP maintained a campus in Cupertino till 2010, when it offered the land to Apple to construct Apple Park.
No matter these ties, the iPod+HP by no means got here throughout like a significant collaboration between the 2 corporations.
Jobs usually loathed licensing Apple know-how, which explains why he was by no means eager to port Mac OS to different methods. (He solely begrudgingly did this with the NeXTSTEP working system at NeXT.) Jobs instantly canceled the licensed “clone Macs” when he returned to Apple within the late Nineties.
The 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 (kind of) Apple telephone (one other catastrophe, by the best way).
Steve Jobs’ sensible technique
By 2004, Jobs had backed down on his hard-line view that the iTunes Music Retailer ought to by no means be out there on a non-Mac pc. (The service expanded to Home windows PCs in late 2003.) Nonetheless, HP stands out as the one Home windows producer that ever manufactured its personal iPod variant.
As a part of the deal, iTunes got here preinstalled on all HP Pavilion and Compaq Presario computer systems. In idea, it was a win-win for each corporations. HP obtained a novel promoting level, whereas Apple may additional broaden its iTunes market. This gave iTunes a presence in locations like Walmart and RadioShack, the place Apple didn’t promote its computer systems.
The truth is, the HP iPod deal might have been a sensible little bit of company jiu-jitsu on Apple’s half. In a 2015 Medium put up, titled “How Steve Jobs Fleeced Carly Fiorina,” journalist Steven Levy prompt that the transfer was a strategic one to dam HP from putting in Home windows Media Retailer on the corporate’s 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 thousands and thousands of computer systems free of charge, stifled his major competitor, and gotten an organization that prided itself on invention to declare that Apple was a superior inventor. And he misplaced nothing, besides the couple of minutes it took him to name Carly Fiorina and say he was sorry she obtained canned.
Pulling the plug on the HP iPod
In the end, the deal did not ship the type of gross sales figures HP hoped for. On July 29, 2005, Hewlett-Packard terminated the iPod deal, though the corporate remained contractually obligated to put in iTunes on its computer systems till January 2006. Finally, HP launched its personal Compaq audio participant, which didn’t make waves.
Do you keep in mind the iPod+HP? Have been you first uncovered to iTunes by an HP pc? Tell us within the feedback under.
