I am surprised that more weblogs have not pointed to the New York Times Magazine article from the November 30, 2003 edition, entitled The Guts of a New Machine. This is an article about the pervasive influence that the iPod has had on popular culture and industrial design. iPods are not just digital music players, they are cultural phenomena.
The article says that it’s been two years since the iPod came to market, that 1.4 million have been sold since, and it has become Apple Computer’s biggest product by sales volume. It continues:
So you can say 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.
I was emailing with my friend David Field in London earlier today, arguing that certain technology trends cannot be fully understood unless they are actually used. I was talking about WiFi when I said that, but, the same case can be made for the iPod and TiVo. Unlike WiFi, however, I’m saying that MP3 and PVR technologies are not as significant in themselves as iPod and TiVo user experiences are. A lot of American consumers will probably never understand these nuances, but I think a lot of Operation Gadget readers already do. [via Kottke.org remaindered links ]
Note: I just realized that I inadvertantly created two stories on this website with the same URL. As a result, this story was inaccessible for some time. I moved the more recent story, New York Times Compares Satellite Radio Systems to a new URL: http://www.operationgadget.com/2003/12/ny_times_compar.html. Sorry for the confusion.