Tony Fadell wanted Apple to buy Sonos; Steve wanted to sue it

A fun piece of Apple history has been revealed thanks to a look at how Sonos started and where it is headed. It turns out that ‘father of the iPod‘ Tony Fadell wanted Apple to buy the premium audio company.

Fadell tried to persuade Steve Jobs to do so, but Apple’s co-founder refused, saying that he instead wanted to sue the company …

The Information’s Nick Wingfield wrote a piece entitled Where Does Sonos Go From Here, in which he revealed that an unnamed former Apple exec tried to persuade Steve Jobs to buy the audio company. The article is paywalled, but Daring Fireball shared an interesting paragraph.

Years ago, a former senior Apple executive told me he once begged Steve Jobs, who was then Apple’s CEO, to buy Sonos. Jobs wasn’t interested. A lot has changed since then, but the Sonos brand still might have enough cachet to interest a more powerful suitor.

The site’s John Gruber observed that the reference to a former senior exec made for a pretty limited list of possible names. His theory was Scott Forstall, but he also wondered about Tony Fadell – the man responsible for the iPod design.

He reached out to Fadell who confirmed that it was indeed him, and shared a little more of the story.

I asked Tony Fadell and he confirmed to me it was him, saying it was back in the very earliest days of Sonos, when Sonos was set to debut with a device featuring an obviously iPod-like scroll wheel for input. Jobs wanted to sue (of course). But Fadell, after meeting with the founders, wanted to buy them, and made his case to Jobs, to no avail, several times circa 2003. Fadell said his pitch was basically “Seriously, we are all about music. Customers want this. I want this.” And Jobs’s response was, according to Fadell, “No one wants what they are selling.”

The device in question was the Song Mobile (below), and there’s no question that it was heavily modelled on the iPod, so Steve’s reaction was understandable. But there’s also no question that Steve was wrong about the appeal of Sonos products, and in particular the overlap in customer base.

Sonos did, however, make a massive misstep with the launch of a new app which broke a lot of functionality and badly eroded the trust of its customers. Its latest attempt to put things right is firing the previous CEO and appointing Tom Conrad as a temporary replacement.

However, since one of Conrad’s first acts was to fire the company’s chief product officer, Gruber suggests that me may be “as much ‘interim’ CEO as Steve Jobs was in 1997.”

Image: 9to5Mac composite of images by Sonos and Mike Yukhtenko on Unsplash