Inside Look at Birth of the IPod →

Ben Knauss, former Senior Manager at PortalPlayer, the company that part-built the iPod for Apple, talks to Wired about its creation:

“They’d have meetings and Steve would be horribly offended he couldn’t get to the song he wanted in less than three pushes of a button,” Knauss said. “We’d get orders: ‘Steve doesn’t think it’s loud enough, the sharps aren’t sharp enough, or the menus not coming up fast enough.’ Every day there were comments from Steve saying where it needed to be.”

Knauss said Jobs’ influence was sometimes idiosyncratic. For example, the iPod is louder than most MP3 players because Jobs is partly deaf, he said. “They drove the sound up so he could hear it,” Knauss said.