I Think, Therefore iPod.

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Author: Ihnatko, Andy

See, when Apple promises to show you something new and innovative, you hope for something like the Newton, an item that overwhelms you with its daring, cunning, and freshness of approach. The iPod is indeed new and innovative, but in a more common, Apple IIc kind of way. It's a conventional device produced by making an unconventional hardware choice and then following the Apple convention of seeing that choice through, with due consideration of all the little implications it will have for the user.

There are already a couple of hard-drive-based portable players on the market, after all; the Nomad Jukebox is the most visible. But previously, these big-assed players were kneecapped by half-assed implementations. The Nomad is huge (for a portable player), and its USB interface is so slow that by the time you're done copying songs to its hard drive, half the bands you're listening to have moved from MTV's Total Request Live to VH1's Where Are They Now? And anyone who has contemplated the wide gulf between Anka, Paul, and Zappa, Frank, won't know the half of it until they try to use only a small set of buttons to navigate from one to the other through a long list.

Implications ought to inform implementations: that's the difference between clever and stupid, and it's the difference between a mega MP3 player that's a freak product and one that's a credible mainstream choice. It's also, but not always, the difference between Apple's products and other companies'. Like the best of Apple's wares, the iPod makes you think about not what it does but what you can do with it.

Still, the iPod is an enticingly odd beastie. During my Apple briefing, I was initially confused about what this thing actually did. The name is generic. Nothing on its face has the familiar layout of an audio player, and only a close examination reveals that three of those arc-shaped buttons have playback symbols faintly silk-screened on them. Lying inert on the table, it could have been anything.

As I lean back on my sofa with my iPod and let the trance-inducing opening strains of Spiritualized's Pure Phase wash over me, I find my mind wandering and speculating. Is the iPod in fact a far more forward-looking device than I suspect? Think about this device in the abstract. It's not a conventional MP3 player. It is, in fact, a pocket-size FireWire hard drive, with built-in software for independently playing limited types of media and a rudimentary GUI that lets you navigate quickly through hundreds and thousands of files.

What if the iPod's destiny were to be a media viewer, as opposed to a music machine? I can fit a whole episode of Babylon 5 into a nearly VHS-quality 500MB QuickTime movie. Will the iPod 2 interact with iMovie as easily as the current version does with iTunes?

Will the iPod 3 have QuickTime and MacLink translators, for reading any document and viewing any picture that has the right file type? What if it has a simple piece of code that lets you scroll through lists of contacts and appointments synced from Palm Desktop?

By the time I'm into Track 6, I'm wondering what would happen if the iPod 4 shipped with a software-development kit--which means that I should hit the Menu button and scroll down to the Monty Python and the Holy Grail soundtrack to slap myself back into relative reality.

The next generation of truly revolutionary devices won't be computers or PDAs. They'll be innocuous little doodads that look and operate nothing like "real" computers and are as intimidating to the average human as a yo-yo (so still intimidating to some). Under the right circumstances and with the right software, the iPod could be such a device.

But the iPod is not the Newton. Unlike the original MessagePad, the iPod is sold by a company that has learned one lesson from bitter experience: while it's important for your technology to stay ahead of your competitors', getting ahead of your customers is death. Man alive, though--as a pocket-size electronic wrapper for toting and accessing desktop media and files, the potential of the iPod is such that one day it could give me and the rest of the world access to things far more ambitious than the audio portion of the "Knights Who Say 'Ni!'" sketch. How Apple is that?

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By Andy Ihnatko

Andy Ihnatko has been writing about the Mac for over a decade.