CASE STUDY TWO

Two years ago this month, Apple computer released a small, sleek-looking device it called the iPod. A digital music player, it weight just 6.5 ounces and held about 1,000 songs. There were small MP3 players around at the at the time, and there were players that could hold a lot of music. But if the crucial equation is "largest number of song" divided by "smallest physical space", the iPod seemed untouchable. Yet the initial reaction was mixed: the thing cost $400, so much more than existing digital players that it prompted one online sceptic to suggest that the name might be an acronym for "Idiots Price Our Devices".

Since then, however, about 1.4 million iPods have been sold. For the month of July and August, the iPod claimed the NO. 1 spot in the MP3 player market both in term of unit share (31 per cent) and revenue share (56 per cent), by Apple's reckoning. It is now Apple's highest-volume product. Whether the iPod achieves truly mass scale-like, say, the cassette tape Walkman, which sold astonishing 186 million units in its first 20 years of existing is certainly qualifies as a hit an as a genuine breakthrough.

So you can see that the iPod is innovative, but it's harder to nail down whether the key is what's inside it, the external appearance or even the way these work together. One approach is to peel your way through the thing, layer by layer.

The Aura

Before you even get to the surface of the iPod, you encounter what could be called its aura. The commercial version of an aura is a brand, and while Apple may be a niche player in the computer market, the fanatical brand loyalty of its customer is legendary . Leander Kahney has even written a book about it, The Cult of Mac. As he points out, that base has supported the company with a faith in it will to innovate - even during stretches when it hasn't. Apple is also a giant in the world of industrial design. The candy-coloured look of the iMac has been so widely copied that it's now a visual clich.

But the iPod is making an even bigger impression. Bruce Claxton who is the current president of the Industrial Designers Society of America and a senior designer of Motorola, calls the device emblematic of shift toward products that are "an antidote to the hyper lifestyle," which might be symbolized by hand-held devices that bristle with buttons and controls that seems to promise a million functions if you only had time to figure them all out. "People are seeking out products that are not just simple to use but a joy to use". Moby, the recording artist, has been a high-profile iPod booster since the product's debate. "The kind of insidious revolutionary quality of the iPod," he says, "is that it's so elegant and logical, it becomes part of your life so quickly that you can't remember what it was like beforehand".

The idea of innovation, particularly technological innovation, has a kind of aura around it, too. Imagine the lone genius, sheltered from the storm of short-term commercial demands in a research lab somewhere, whose tinkering produces a sudden and momentous breakthrough. Or maybe we think innovation begins with an epiphany, a sudden vision of the future. Either way, we think of that one thing, the lightning bolt that jolted all the other pieces into place. The Walkman came about because a Sony executive wanted a high-quality but small stereo tape player to listen on long flights. A small recorder was modified, with the recording pieces removed and stereo circuitry added. That was February 1979, and within six months the product was on the market.

The iPod's history is comparatively free of lightning-both moments. Apple was not ahead of the curve in recognising the power of music in digital form. Various portable digital music player were already on the market before the iPod was even an idea. The company had, back in the 1990's, invented a technological FireWire, which is basically a tool of for moving data between digital device - in large quantities, very quickly. Apple licensed this technology to various Japanese consumer electronic companies (which used in it in digital camcorders and players) and eventually started adding FireWire ports to iMac and creating video editing software. This led to programs called iMovie, then iPhoto and then a conceptual view of the home computer as a "digital hub" that would complement a range of devices. Finally, in January 2001, iTunes was added to the mix.

And although the next step sound prosaic - we make software that lets you organize the music on your computer, so maybe we should make one of those things that lets you take it with you - it was also something new. There were companies that made jukebox software, and companies that made portable players, but nobody made both. What this meant is not that the iPod could do more, but that it would do less. This is what led to what Jonathan Ive, Apple's vice president of industrial design, calls the iPod's "overt simplicity". And this, perversely, is the most exciting think about it.

The surface

The surface of the iPod, white on front and stainless steel behind, is perfectly seamless. It's close to impenetrable. You hook it up to a computer with iTunes, and whatever music you have collected there flows (incredibly fast, thanks to that FireWire cable) into the iPad - again, seamless. Once it's in there, the surface of the iPod is not likely to cause problems for user, because there's almost nothing on it. Just that wheel, one button in the centre, an four beneath the device's LCD screen.

"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 make a different thing. What was exiciting is starting to realize that is difference was really a consequences of this quest to make it a very simple thing".

Only Apple could have developed the iPod. Like, the device itself, Apple appears seamless :it has the hardware engineers, the software engineers, the industrial designers, all under one roof and working together. "As technology become more complex, Apple's core strength of knowing how to make very of sophisticated technology comprehensible to mere mortals is in even greater demand." This is why, Gobs) said, the barrage of devices made by everyone from Philips to Samsung to Dell that are imitating an will imitate the iPod do not make him nervous. "The Dell of the world, don't spend money" on design innovation, he said. "They don't think about these thing."

Since this article was written in 2003, Apple have continued its inexorable rise and expanded its range of products. In addition to the Classic iPod discussed in this article, Apple has launched variants for different sector of the market, including the "nano", "shuffle" and the "touch", each with different features. In April 2007, Apple announced via its website as (http://www.apple.com/prllibrary/2007/04/09ipod.html) that 100 millions iPod had been sold worldwide. In January 2007 it combined its latest iPod technology, including touch screen facilitiy, within a mobile and Internet communication device, in the shape of the iPhone. They have also created an "Apps" store which allows content in the form of small applications to be uploaded onto the device for free or purchased for a small fee. In June 2009 they had sold over a millions iPhones (http://www.apple.com/prllibrary/2009/06/22iphone.html). It remains to be seen where Apple will direct its energies in 2010 and beyond, but it shows no sign of resting on its laurels.

Questions

1.What is novel about the iPod?

2.What type of innovation would you class the Sony Walk-mans and why?

3.What type of innovation would you class the iPod as and why?