Tony Fadell graduated from university in 1991 and he went straight to work for electronics companies designing personal handheld communicators – they were so different from the devices we carry today! In his free time, he loved to DJ, and he dreamed of the day that he wouldn’t have to carry big cases of CD’s from location to location.
But inventors don’t wait around! Tony Fadell started designing his own device that he called a ‘personal jukebox’. He even quit his corporate job and started his own company so he could work on it. Making electronics is expensive though, and he didn’t have the funds to actually build it.
Opportunities come to people who work hard, and a big opportunity came to Tony when Apple called him. They needed a portable music player and they asked him to design it. It took a whole team of people to take his idea and turn it into a product you can buy in a store. The first iPod was sold in 2001, and its successor, the iPhone remains very popular to this day.
