iPod family secrets
Posted by dan on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008Steve Jobs recently unveiled Apple’s new iPod Nano. The forth generation Nano is supposed to be the thinnest yet, with clever new functions such as ’shake to shuffle’ which basically shuffles your songs at the flick of a wrist. It also boasts a ‘genius’ feature which claims to be able to find similar songs in your music library that sound great together. Perhaps these machines really are becoming self aware, although I’m guessing that if you think Cliff and The Ting Tings sit well together your going to be disappointed!
These modifications and tweaks are a world away from the original idea behind a portable digital audio player. Who would have thought that the vision of a 23 year old Kane Kramer would go on to sell over 160 million units for Apple alone. The British inventors’ designs back in 1979 set out to revolutionise the music industry and went on to become the blue print for what we now know as the MP3 player.
The original idea involved using telephone lines to distribute the music, naturally this would have resulted in an analog sound as this was many years before the internet was available. The device stored just 3.5 minutes of music onto a chip. However, in 1988 with the patents not being renewed the technology became public property and the rest, as they say, is history.
Apple recently recognised Kane Kramer for his inventorship and now he now acts as an expert consultant. Small change considering Apple have made billions of dollars from iPod sales.
The sketch for Kramer’s music player bares a striking resemblance to the original iPod. Next week drawings of flying cars!
Tags: Product Design
