Buying In - (Page 66) 66 rob walker underpinnings of the device—its guts, as it were. I spoke to David Carey, founder of a company called Portelligent, which tears apart electronic devices and does what might be called “guts checks.” He performed his first iPod autopsy in early 2002, months after its release; he helped me understand the impressive internal design, built around a tiny hard disk. The most popular digital music players before the iPod came along did not use hard disks. Rather, they used another type of storage technology, referred to as a “flash chip.” These took up less space—which meant the device could be smaller—but held less data (in this case, fewer songs). If the crucial equation was “largest number of songs” divided by “smallest physical space,” Apple seemed to have broken from the pack by coming up with a physical configuration that included a hard drive. But in truth, the iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player to use a hard disk. That honor goes to a different device, released around two years before Apple’s product hit the market, by a Singapore-based company called Creative. (Apple allegedly even approached Creative in early 2001 about ways the companies might work together, but Creative wasn’t interested. That didn’t come out until some years later, after Apple paid Creative $100 million to settle legal wrangle that arose after Creative sued for patent infringement in 2006.) Clearly, the technical innovation of using a tiny hard drive was not enough, by itself, to crack the Desire Code on a mass scale. The iPod differed from Creative’s product in several ways. For one thing, the iPod was aggressively advertised and marketed, something Creative hardly bothered with. And then there was the form factor. Many of the experts I spoke with felt the key to the success of Apple’s device lay in how easy and intuitive it was to use, with as few buttons as possible and its now famous
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