the tao of ipod

Rob Walker has an interesting piece - The Guts of a New Machine - in tomorrow's Magazine section of the NY Times.

I have dabbled in the digital music world for six or seven years. From 1998 to 2000 we spent some time playing around with portable digital players. Ours lacked the clarity of direction that allows good design - I doubt that we would have ever done anything as wonderful as an iPod, but we had a 1.8" hard disk player on the drawing board in 1999 (as did many other people). We also were worried about how people interact with music. Some of our work was much deeper than what Apple has shown so far, other pieces of it (in particular the user interface and physical design of the player) were more shallow.

One of the more interesting quotes came from Steve Jobs:

'... We consciously think about making great products. We don't think, 'Let's be innovative!''' He waved his hands for effect. '''Let's take a class! Here are the five rules of innovation, let's put them up all over the company!'''

Well, I said defensively, there are people who do just that.

''Of course they do.'' I felt his annoyance shift elsewhere. ''And it's like . . . somebody who's not cool trying to be cool. It's painful to watch. You know what I mean?'' ...

My old company, a huge telecom, had a research arm with brilliant people and a business arm with people who knew quite a bit (or thought they did - Wall Street thinks otherwise) about telephony. One of these managers was in charge of the online music effort (including digital players, codec licensing and some other major Internet businesses). It was painful watching her fumble around starting fires and stomping out good ideas. When she finally left the company (with a huge golden parachute) she was given a few top of the line ThinkPads. She sheepishly approached one of her direct reports and said I really like Yahoo, could you install it on my machine before I leave? The amazing thing is that her bosses didn't see through her incompetence until her division failed.

But back to the iPod.

Jonathan Ive, Apple's design lead, gets at the core of the iPod:

'Steve'' -- that would be Steve Jobs -- ''made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content,'' Ive says. ''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.''

Later he said: ''What's interesting is that out of that simplicity, and almost that unashamed sense of simplicity, and expressing it, came a very different product. But difference wasn't the goal. It's actually very easy to create a different thing. What was exciting is starting to realize that its difference was really a consequence of this quest to make it a very simple thing.''

Making something simple isn't easy. Most companies simply ignore it (how many intuitive designs have you see that involve electronics?) or do it poorly (almost anything from Microsoft). People put up with bad design - after an initial learning curve they learn enough to use the object.

The iPod is intuitive - for me the simplicity of being able to do exactly what I need to do has bonded me to the unit. At the time when the iPod was introduced other players were so broken in design (forget the capacity) and build quality that the unit stood out. The total experience of dealing with music on my Mac and moving it to the iPod is equally seamless (a friend notes: MusicMatch may be the best of the Windows jukeboxes, but that is like saying a prostrate exam is my favorite form of invasive medicine).

Taking an iPod apart is a fascinating experience. There is attention to detail where few will see it. The quality of components is outstanding (Walker notes that it is a collection of subcomponents from a variety of manufacturers - with the exception of large Japanese houses like Sony and Toshiba, this is how everyone works these days). The article mentions the cpu/controller assembly, but the digital to analog converter/amplifier is over-speced for a portable unit. Even Stereophile has noted its audio quality. Rolls Royce and Bentley used to note their automobiles had sufficient power for the task at hand and not detail the internal design. Apple seems to be taking a similar approach.

I suspect the simplicity is what sells the unit. Other companies will certainly come up with better storage to price ratios (they already have). Most people buy electronics by looking at one or two items in a store that are on sale. It isn't clear that iPods will sell well to this crowd.

Now if Apple will only start working on issues of extending the iPod to encompass how people really use music -- there is so much to be done and I suspect they are the only company that would get it right.

____
I note that the iPod is certainly not perfect - few things are. It is just much better than the competition.

Comments

[sara]

I love the part on the executive asking to have yahoo installed on her laptop!

[Steve Cisler]

I was in Lost Angels this holiday weekend, and a bunch of ipod ads are on freeway billboards, so millions see them.

Silhouette of some cool person listening to one, solid color background and just the word 'ipod' I guess they anticiapte a lot of sales during this season, so they invested in the ads.

[Larry Christenson]

It was interesting coming across this. I even paid for the Times article.

I was given an iPod last Summer to celebrate my 60th birthday. It is one of my favorite material possessions and I don't know how I got by without it.

This Christmas I gave iPods to my three children. The two grandchildren aren't old enough to appreciate one yet, so only their parents rated. I don't think the family has been happier.