STEVE JOBS knew that he needed something stunningly new to revitalise Apple. Additions to the Macintosh computer line, taking advantage of the latest improvements in technology and the internet — all this was fine, but it wasn’t enough. He was looking for something else, something big.

Eventually, his eye lit on the music scene. Music, he said, “is in our DNA. Everybody loves it. This isn’t a speculative market.”

The Macworld Expo in San Francisco at the beginning of 2001 marked a turning point for Apple, extending the company into digital music and photography. The new product Jobs was announcing was called iTunes. It wasn’t the first in the field, and it offered many of the same features as the SoundJam MP application it was based on.

But the difference was unmistakable. In every project Jobs had been connected with, he expounded on the need for elegance, ease of use, and artistry of design. iTunes was no exception.

With it, Macintosh users could copy tracks from a CD on to their computer, from where they could select any one and play it in an instant. They could also download MP3 music files from the internet. Even better, owners of portable MP3 players such as the popular Rio could use iTunes to download songs to the player.

Jobs told the audience: “iTunes is miles ahead of every other jukebox application, and we hope its dramatically simpler user interface will bring even more people into the digital music revolution.”

The world would soon learn that Jobs wasn’t just joining the revolution; he was about to reshape it.

Digital music players looked like a ready-made market, yet consumers hadn’t taken to them. Sales of the devices were anaemic. Why weren’t they selling better? Apple vice-president Greg Joswiak boiled it down to the basics: “The products stank.”

To Jobs it seemed that other companies weren’t offering any kind of competition. The entire playing field was his for the taking.

Even Jobs doesn’t always know where the next big thing will come from. One day a young itinerant high-tech consultant came to work at Apple with the rudiments of a design in his head for a handheld music player. It was a marriage made in high-tech heaven.

Tony Fadell had tried to sell the idea for a business that would combine a hardware element — an MP3 player — with a Napster-like music source. It was just what Apple was looking for. Fadell decided to base the new design on an existing product, PortalPlayer, from a company in California. PortalPlayer was working on designs for at least two MP3 players, one of them not much bigger than a cigarette packet.

The prototypes were “fairly ugly”, according to PortalPlayer’s Ben Knauss. One in particular was “typical of an interface done by hardware guys. It looked like an FM radio with a bunch of buttons”.

Jobs stayed close to the project, his brilliance as a marketer and his flawless taste in design shining through in his demands for the highest standards. Knauss recalled: “Steve would be horribly offended if he couldn’t get to the song he wanted in less than three pushes of a button.” Every day, Knauss said, there were comments from Jobs on the improvements he wanted.