The iPod really wasn't a technically complex product though - no more so then anything else at the time. The original iPod was "just" a hard drive with an LCD on it.
The big innovation was the wheel interface, and the quality of the plastic packaging/housing. Apple's big value proposition was realizing they could put premium-looking styling on a product and that would then justify the price point to add capability - at the time the whole point of the iPod was "it's got enormous storage". It literally was just a laptop HDD in a housing though.
Which is to say: Apple's timeline for that is a pretty standard consumer product timeline. If they'd taken much longer then that you'd have to wonder what they were wasting their time on.
EDIT: Like it's worth considering that Apple probably owes a lot of it's success to the specific finish and chemical formulation of the plastic they use, more then any specific technical merits of a lot of their products - building a plastic gadget that felt as good as an iPod did was a heck of an achievement, just not in the area people think.
I wouldn't trivialize the iPod effort. Zero to a finished, manufacturable, product. There's software. There was coordination with a bunch of external vendors. And, sure as you say aspects of design and materials.
I've seen many software projects of smaller scope that get stuck or lose direction.
The big innovation was the wheel interface, and the quality of the plastic packaging/housing. Apple's big value proposition was realizing they could put premium-looking styling on a product and that would then justify the price point to add capability - at the time the whole point of the iPod was "it's got enormous storage". It literally was just a laptop HDD in a housing though.
Which is to say: Apple's timeline for that is a pretty standard consumer product timeline. If they'd taken much longer then that you'd have to wonder what they were wasting their time on.
EDIT: Like it's worth considering that Apple probably owes a lot of it's success to the specific finish and chemical formulation of the plastic they use, more then any specific technical merits of a lot of their products - building a plastic gadget that felt as good as an iPod did was a heck of an achievement, just not in the area people think.