Buying In - (Page 65) buying in 65 products; and really, a serious music fan like me would use the thing to its full potential and get my money’s worth. Not long after that, I happened to go to a retreat for the online magazine Slate, which was then owned by Microsoft. This was still early enough in the life of the iPod that pretty much nobody else at the retreat had really handled one yet. I’m generally not an early adopter of gizmos (at that time, I still hadn’t gotten around to buying a cell phone), and there was something oddly pleasing about watching a bunch of people— Microsoft employees, no less!—pass around my Apple purchase, clearly impressed, if not by the music I’d stuffed it with, then with the device itself. I remember having the vague hunch that this object could become a hit, the way these people pawed it. But another part of me suspected that, in the end, it would be a profitable niche product, like Apple’s computers, that appealed to a particular segment of the consumer population, but not to the masses. I was wrong. So what was it about the iPod that made it such a success? Well, that’s not quite the right question. The key is in the secret dialogue between the iPod and those of us who bought it the object In late 2003, when the iPod was in its third generation and pretty clearly on its road to being not just a hit, but a consumer-culture icon and a mass-market phenomenon, I shifted from my role as someone who had bought something to my role as someone who tries to figure out why other people buy things. The best starting point seemed to be the technological
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