> The engraving was created using imagemagick, which took the user’s text and returned an “engraved” image to be overlaid on the rear of the iPod.

Couldn't this be handled client-side, just overlaying plain text in gray 'Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif' on top of the image? At this scale, the specific font doesn't matter.

Although interestingly, Apple still renders the text server-side (and offers engraving only for iPads, apparently): https://www.apple.com/shop/preview/engrave/PH304LL/A?th=hell...