Straight Dope on the IPod's Birth | Hacker News Reader

Straight Dope on the IPod's Birth

wired.com

94 pointsjdc33 comments

> ''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.

And now the iPod nano has a video camera, can watch movies, play FM radio, etc.

Maybe it's more about the gradual introduction of all these things to the masses.

No, it's about delivering the essential things first. If they wasted effort doing all that other stuff first, all of those features would be badly integrated into the product. This means that they would be hard to learn about and use. And if they're jammed in before the technology is ready, they'll make the device ugly because they'll add so much bulk and heft that the essential feature of the device is hampered or lost entirely.

> 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.

> So far, Apple has failed miserably at cloud computing experiences.

So far, Apple has barely showed any interest in it. How can they fail at something they never even tried?

What about MobileMe? I'd say they've tried, and they've been an also-ran since the beginning.

Maybe the purchase of LaLa will change that.

> What about MobileMe?

Doing something with iDisk/me.com.

> I'd say they've tried

I don't.

What happens if the IPhone 5 can stream your music directly from ITunes?

The statement could be interpreted to mean that Apple has failed at providing cloud computing experiences. Either way the result is the same: if I want to sync via the cloud with Apple then it's a pretty crappy experience.

They did buy lala to transition iTunes into a cloud-based service.. So try they will it would seem.

Sure, I see them trying in the future (and maybe failing at that point).

I completely agree. Itunes really is a terrible way to manage both an iPhone and an iPad. The result of a sync is always a bit of a surprise these days...

I don't even want to begin to imagine what it must be like for a family with multiple iPhones all syncing to the same machine....

That doesn't really happen though. A family with multiple iPhones usually has multiple computers too.

Absolutely.

People keep asking me what software I use to sync my Nexus One with my Mac. I usually tell them that, while DoubleTwist lets me organize media onto the device easily, you really don't need to hook it up to a computer: application backups and system updates are run over the net, for instance. It's usually confusing to them at first, because the iPhone requires a computer running iTunes at such a fundamental level.

I do really like that iTunes keeps a complete backup of my phone. It could probably be done over the cloud someday but it backs up everything even the read/unread status of text messages, icon placement, settings, etc. Everything.

My Palm does that, only I don't need a computer: it does it over the net onto Palm servers. The only thing that doesn't get backed up is media files. However, apps, settings, contacts, notes, etc. are all invisibly backed up daily.

Really, there's no excuse for needing iTunes. If Palm can get this right with their miniscule resources, Apple certainly has the capacity to do cloud-based backups. They just haven't made it a priority.

How much data can you have on your Palm? 16GB, 32GB? Backing that amount of data puts some requirements on the network too, not only on Apple capacity.

Google is treating this as something that should exist now rather than "someday".

You can go to the store today and buy a new Android phone and when you put in your Google Voice credentials, it will have all of your text messages with their read status. There is no reason a USB cable and laptop need to be involved in that process.

Except you don't give Google $2000 to sync your Android phone - from somebody's point of view that could be regarded as a huge failure!

does this include application data?

When my wife upgraded her iPhone a year ago, iTunes did a "restore from backup" and her new phone was then (an hour or two later) set up exactly like her previous one, including all applications and their data, saved games, in progress games, options, settings, the lot.

Full backup (of data of applications that don't sync with online services) can be done on the SD card, which can then be moved to another phone. Not as nice as if it were all done online, but it works for now.

Slightly related, I wish Android would stop using the SIM card's internal memory. Just import the information on there when a new card is detected and forget about it from there on. I had to fiddle for half an hour to get my wife's data from her SIM card into the normal Android contacts. Half of that was because the UI to do so isn't very obvious. (most of the other part was sorting out the duplicates).

Bear in mind that this article dates back to 2006. Jobs can see the world around him changing and adapt.

That's my point. The iPad came out in 2010 and is a big flat paper-weight without an iTunes powered computer to plug it into. He's still selling the digital hub.

The amount of stuff you actually have to sync by plugging in a cable has decreased with every version of iOS. Apple is moving slowly (maybe too slow) but they are moving.

The iPad is only a paperweight without iTunes if you want to be really strict about it — yeah, the initial sync is still necessary (they will do it for you in the Apple Store if you ask, so if you really wanted to you would never have to sync) but then you can do pretty much everything except non-iTunes Store music and videos, photos and (a big one, admittedly) OS updates over the air.

Agreed. The strategy dates back even further to 2000-2001, ostensibly when the quoted comments were made.

You're missing the point. The genius of the iPod, and the reason it neatly destroyed all of its competitors for years, was that it offloaded complexity, like adding music and editing metadata, to a general-purpose computer. The only things the iPod did were things it was good at.

Whether such complexity belongs on a general-purpose computer or in the cloud is orthogonal to the choice Apple made, which is to put the complexity not-on-the-device.

All the competitors did the same thing. I'm not even sure what "adding music" without a computer would look like. Apple just streamlined and simplified it by assuming you'd use their products from end to end (iPod - Mac - iTunes).

That means removing features from the device was balanced by adding them to another Apple product i.e. it wasn't orthogonal at all, it was part of the digital hub strategy that could be considered to be holding them back now.

>> ...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:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/ipod.html

Cross-reference with this classic story from Cabel Sasser of Panic

http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/

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.

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