January 8, 2004: The clumsily named Apple iPod + HP, a Hewlett-Packard-branded iPod, makes it debut on the Client 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 yr, nevertheless, the system is similar shade of white because the common iPod. It 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, nevertheless, shared historical past between the 2 firms. As a child, Steve Jobs appeared up HP co-founder Invoice Hewlett within the telephone guide. He wound up getting a summer season job on the firm. HP additionally employed Steve Wozniak in the course of 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 programs. 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 identify to a different firm — though he did license iTunes to Motorola to create the first (type of) Apple telephone.
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 obtainable on a non-Mac pc. The service had expanded to Home windows PCs in late 2003. Nonetheless, HP was the one Home windows producer that ever obtained 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 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 computer systems weren’t bought.
In truth, the HP iPod deal could have been a sensible little bit of company jiu-jitsu on Apple’s half. In a 2015 Medium publish, titled “How Steve Jobs Fleeced Carly Fiorina,” journalist Steven Levy steered 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 pal” 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 tens of millions of computer systems free of charge, stifled his primary 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, HP terminated the deal, though the corporate was contractually obligated to put in iTunes on its computer systems till January 2006. Ultimately, it launched its personal Compaq audio participant, which didn’t make waves.
Do you keep in mind the Apple iPod + HP? Have been you first uncovered to iTunes by way of an HP pc? Tell us within the feedback under.
