Father of iPod Tony Fadell says it was conceived, designed, and released inside a year

Apple is so secretive that it isn't until years later that we start to find out how things really went down. That's been the case with iPod for a while and now we're hearing more about how the music player came about. According to Tony Fadell, it went from nothing to being in stores in less than a year.

Tony Fadell is often called the father of iPod, and he was certainly the key driving force behind making it happen. But it turns out that when he was brought on-board Apple didn't have any plans at all. It just knew that it wanted to make something that played music from Toshiba's 1.8-inch hard disk.

Fadell told Stripe CEO Patrick Collison (via 9to5Mac) that there was no iPod to speak of when he joined. And the timeline after that is scary.

The fact that there was no team in place until May makes things all the more amazing, but just a few months later Steve Jobs was on a stage announcing iPod. And Apple hasn't been the same since.