During the same meeting, Apple's Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, presented mock-ups of a player featuring the now familiar scroll wheel. Schiller personally thought of the idea as a solution to a troubling interface problem at the time.

Other MP3 players used plus and minus buttons that would move, one item at a time, through a list of songs, which would grow tedious if the unit held a thousand songs--basically, you'd have to push the button a thousand times. With a wheel, a quick flick of the finger would navigate through the list at any rate the user wanted--especially since Apple would make the scroll speed accelerate the longer you spun the wheel.

Steve Jobs liked the ideas he saw and offered Fadell a job at Apple to continue his work. After a period of uncertainty, Fadell joined Apple full-time in April 2001. The iPod project--then code named "P-68"--had officially begun.

With Apple's portable music project officially in gear, Fadell needed to settle on a release schedule. After some consultation with Apple's marketing department, Fadell decided that iPod would ship during the 2001 Christmas shopping season, which only gave him six months to form a team, develop a product, get it manufactured, and push it out the door.