Straight Dope on the IPod's Birth
> ''Steve made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content, '' Ive told The New York Times. ''It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device -- which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren't obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.''
I remember back in 2002 or so I had bought an ARCHOS because it had a camera, video camera and played movies. I then saw non technical friends starting to talk about the iPod. I honestly felt it was like hearing non technical people discussing recursion. I knew the iPod must be different. Sure I had plenty of friends that new what MP3's were and downloaded them, but they were my technological friends. So to hear these non techies talk about the iPod, I was like "Whoa".
I took a step back to compare the ARCHOS that I bought with the iPod. And I realized wow Steve Job's is very smart [1] and at that moment I realized Apple is going to be bigger than Microsoft. As Jon Ive says in the quote above: "It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device -- which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise." I had already realized this works very well for In-N-Out Burger. So well that when Chipotle came out I knew it would be a success.
It has really surprised me how Steve Jobs laid out the winning model for making a product 9 years ago and few companies have followed. It is actually rather frustrating. Every time Apple comes out with a new product (for the most part), a few people are like "Yes, this is amazing" and everyone else complains "It doesn't have enough features. It sucks."
[1] The ARCHOS had a bunch of features such as a camera, camcorder and it could play videos. But I never used the thing. The interface sucked and the battery life sucked. When I bought an iPod I used it constantly. I still use it. It is much better to have a product that does one thing extremely well than a product that does a bunch of things mediocre or not well at all.
> While describing the player, Jobs constantly referred to Apple's digital hub strategy: The Mac is a hub, or central connection point, for a host of gadgets.
I wonder if this will ultimately be downfall of the whole iPod/iPad/iPhone experience. Apple is still working around the idea of the computer as the central hub (requiring you to sync with iTunes before you can use an iPad, for example) rather than the hub now being entirely in the cloud.
So far, Apple has failed miserably at cloud computing experiences.
>> ...Ive told the Times that the key to the iPod wasn't sudden flashes of genius, but the design process. His design group collaborated closely with manufacturers and engineers, constantly tweaking and refining the design. ''It's not serial,'' he told the Times. ''It's not one person passing something on to the next.''...
Perhaps this and the rest of the article provides some insight into pg's question about Apple's culture: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1596767
I highly recommend Steven Levy's book, The Perfect Thing, for a more in-depth look at the iPod. Levy did a mini article-ized version of his book for Wired a few years ago:
Cross-reference with this classic story from Cabel Sasser of Panic
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
The other kicker about the original use of firewire was that it could charge the iPod simultaneously while syncing. I don't recall usb 1.1 being able to charge a device.