"loved music. The music players that were already on the market, he told his colleagues, "truly sucked." Phil Schiller, Jon Rubinstein, and the rest of the team agreed. As they were building iTunes, they spent time with the Rio and other players while merrily trashing them. "We would sit around and say, 'These things really stink,' " Schiller recalled. "They held about sixteen songs, and you couldn't figure out how to use them." Jobs began pushing for a portable music player in the fall of 2000, but Rubinstein responded that the necessary components were not available yet. He asked Jobs to wait. After a few months Rubinstein was able to score a suitable small LCD screen and rechargeable lithium-polymer battery. The tougher challenge was finding a disk drive that was small enough but had ample memory to make a great music player. Then, in February 2001, he took one of his regular trips to Japan to visit Apple's suppliers. At the end of a routine meeting"