
Chapter 1: Return to the Orchard
Before the iPod changed the world, before the iPhone defined an era—I was called back into a quiet, unassuming building on Apple’s Cupertino campus: Valley Green 6. That’s where my journey with the Special Projects Group began. But the road there was anything but ordinary.
I first joined Apple in the mid-90s, around 1995, as a QA engineer in the Multimedia Integration Quality (MIQ) group. We were the weird kids at Apple—playing with early CD-ROMs, QuickTime VR, and the bleeding edge of media tech on PowerPC desktops. I was also going to a polytechnic school nearby, studying music technology and signal processing. In truth, I was an artist disguised as an engineer—someone who lived on the border between music, moving images, and code.
Apple, at the time, was in freefall. Under Gil Amelio and other suits, the company had no clear direction—just a bloated fleet of overlapping products, reactionary thinking, and a slowly sinking Titanic of a brand. I left before it hit the iceberg, moving on to explore creative tech at Disney as a concept artist and later working in VFX and animation in the Bay Area’s film scene.
Then one day, I got a call. It was Jeremy, a good guy I had helped onboard back in my MIQ days. We had stayed in touch, and without telling me much, he said, “I submitted your name for a secret project at Apple. Steve’s back. It’s worth coming in.”
I agreed, but I had no idea what I was walking into…
The interview was strange and quiet. Most of the questions were technical. But the last person I met was Tony Fadell -the inventor of the iPod, and much more. He flipped through my resume and raised an eyebrow at my creative background—Disney, animation, the film work. He asked, “Why do you want to work at Apple?”
I was honest: “To be honest, I need a job...” He smiled, slightly. “I didn’t know what this was about—my friend just told me to show up. If I’d known it was about audio, I would have tailored my resume. That’s my core skillset.”
Something clicked.
That was the beginning of my journey on the team that would make the iPod. There were only about 30 of us tucked away in that building, quietly working on what would soon redefine the relationship between humans and their music—and eventually lead to the iPhone, the iPad, and the entire modern Apple ecosystem.
I wasn’t a visionary or a lead designer. I was a hands-on audio test engineer learning and working alongside some of the brightest people I’ve ever met. But just being part of that environment—seeing how things were built, how ideas were challenged, how clarity was valued—shaped me deeply. I was lucky enough to be included in a few team lunches with Steve Jobs. He made time to connect with people, and I usually just smiled and nodded, but being in his presence was unforgettable. He was intense, creative, and genuine—his charisma energized the room.
This is the first chapter of that story.