Buying In - (Page 67) buying in 67 “scroll wheel.” Others pointed to more explicitly aesthetic considerations: The iPod just looked gorgeous. Still others argued that the secret to its success was its integration with Apple’s jukebox software, iTunes, which in turn was linked to an online store with a wide selection of music that could be bought and used seamlessly with the device. After hearing all these theories, I decided I needed to go to the source. Apple’s Cupertino, California, headquarters is a series of connected buildings arranged in a circle, and behind this surface is a kind of enclosed park. It looks like public space, but of course it isn’t You can’t get to it unless you’re an Apple employee or are accompanied by one. When I interviewed people at Apple, they were curiously vague. I asked about the technical specs of the device, for instance, and I was told that the answers amounted to so much “esoterica” that consumers don’t care about Jonathan Ive, Apple’s friendly and soft-spoken vice president of industrial design, spent about ten minutes telling me about the iPod’s packaging—the way the box opens, how the foam is cut before I could even ask him a question. He talked about the unusually thin and flexible FireWire cable, about the “taut, crisp” cradle that the iPod rests in. He talked about the white headphones (or “ear buds”). “I remember,” he said, “there was a discussion: ‘Headphones can’t be white; headphones are black or dark gray.’ ” But uniform whiteness seemed too important to the product to break the pattern. So they made the headphones white. Okay, fine, but cool packaging and white headphones couldn’t be what made the object a hit, right? I’ve ventured that perhaps the key was the iPod’s “over simplicity.” This was about as specific as the conversation ever got. I didn’t feel any closer to an answer when I was led farther into the Apple complex, to that parklike area within
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