"Jon" Rubinstein (born October 1956) is an American electrical engineer who played an instrumental role in the development of the iMac and iPod,[1] the portable music and video device first sold by Apple Computer Inc. in 2001.

He became executive chairman of the board at Palm, Inc., after private equity firm Elevation Partners completed a significant investment in the handheld manufacturer in October 2007.

[8] In 2005, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for the design of innovative personal computers and consumer electronics that have defined and led new industries.

In 1990, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs approached Rubinstein to run hardware engineering at his latest venture, NeXT.

Rubinstein headed work on NeXT’s RISC workstation – a graphics powerhouse that was never released because in 1993, the company abandoned its floundering hardware business in favor of a software-only approach.

"[14] Rubinstein joined Apple as Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, and a member of its executive staff.

After critically examining all projects currently in the pipeline, the G3, a fast PowerPC-based desktop machine, was chosen to be Apple's next released product.

Upon its release at the end of 1997, Apple finally had what it hadn't had in years: a cutting-edge desktop machine that could compete with its Intel-based competitors.

The iMac was an immediate success, not only helping to revitalise Apple as a company, but also popularising new technologies at the time, such as USB, which would then go on to become an industry standard.

Rubinstein and Apple popularised a term known as the Megahertz myth, to describe how the PowerPC architecture could not be compared to the Intel architecture simply on their clock speeds (the PowerPC CPUs, despite their lower clock speeds, were generally comparable to Intel CPUs of the era).

[16] Due to the relatively low sales of its Mac computer brand, Apple decided to expand its ecosystem in order to increase its consumer awareness.

While on a routine supplier visit to Toshiba Corp. in February, 2001, however, Rubinstein first saw the tiny, 1.8-inch hard disk drive that became a critical component of the iPod.

[20] Jobs agreed, and Rubinstein assembled and managed a team of hardware and software engineers to ready the product on a rushed, eight-month schedule.

[18] The team’s engineers needed to overcome a number of hurdles, including figuring out how to play music off a spinning hard drive for more than 10 hours without wiping out a battery charge.

[18] Rubinstein’s production contacts proved invaluable, too; the iPod’s sleek, minimalist design, with its high-gloss, engraveable metal back, was a mass-manufacturing triumph.

[17] Other iPod models were released on a regular basis, increasing the device’s capacity, decreasing its size, and adding features including color screens, photo display and video playback.

By early 2008, more than 119 million iPods had been sold,[22] making it not only the most successful portable media player on the market but one of the most popular consumer electronics products of all time.

[23] Rubinstein - sometimes called the "Podfather" because of his role in developing the iPod[1] - was also instrumental in creating a robust secondary market for accessories such as speakers, chargers, docking ports, backup batteries, and other add-ons.

[10] That gear, produced by a network of independent companies that came to be known as "The iPod Ecosystem", by 2006 generated more than $1 billion in annual sales.

[25] By around the fall of 2005, Rubinstein had become upset by Tim Cook’s increasing leadership role as COO and his frequent clashes with SVP of Industrial Design, Jony Ive, who was very close with Jobs.

[26] In October 2005, Apple announced that Rubinstein would be retiring on March 31, 2006, and he was succeeded as iPod chief by Tony Fadell.

He was the featured guest in September 2009 at the first episode of "The Engadget Show," a web videocast produced by the technology weblog.

[40] The deal gave HP another chance to enter the mobile-device market while sending a lifeline to Palm, which some analysts expected to run out of cash within two years.

(HP subsequently slashed the price of the least expensive TouchPad to $99, setting off a buying frenzy and leading technology-research firm Canalys to call it the "must-have technology product of 2011.

[46] Rubinstein's appointment as co-CEO at Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, was announced in a letter to clients in March 2016.