The iPod and all its spawn fascinate me. I’d never buy one because I think they’re overpriced and overrated, but I happily admit to their sexy appeal. The power of brand, high-falutin’ Apple design and market hunger converge to bestow on this family of products a glamor that beggars description. It’s a bit like when the VW Beetle rose from the dead in 1998. Or when Sony’s Walkman first surfaced in the 80s. Or when gay men realized that Calvin Klein underwear equalled virility, youth, and beauty. It’s magic, and it strikes only rarely. The iPod is at the peak of its sorcery, and that’s a wonderful thing to behold.
I’ve recently been involved in UI design for industrial devices. The company I’ve been working for — project by project — holds the iPod up as a “best practice” or “best of breed” object when conducting product or competitive audits. But unofficially, when not preparing for client presentations, many of my colleagues admit that the iPod isn’t all that. Some of them actually deride the user interface. How can this be? How can the designers of fine devices, who are also the consumers of fine devices, use the iPod, tout the iPod, and secretly sigh at the iPod’s defficiencies all in under a minute?
Apple has left their competition in the portable, digital music space in the dust. That is inarguable. Creative Labs, Samsung, Napster, and many others scramble to unite storage space with small form factors and ostensibly sexy UIs. None of them do it well. No one you know who is even remotely interested in what the iPod has to offer owns anything but an iPod.
My theory — and it’s not rocket science — is that Apple has simply claimed a market in a way that it’s never been able to: with crushing dominance. That’s so not Apple. We think of Apple as the adorable, market-fragile fringe player, forever holding its own with verve and style against the verve-less, style-less PC industry. We think of Apple as the precious favorite of precious designers; because designers of all ilk enjoy a mystique, then Apple must share, support, be responsible for, or attend to that mystique. But in the big bad world of technology, Apple is a dwarf. Practically speaking. In tactical respects, irrelevant.
This doesn’t change the fact that Apple is indispensible to the computer-human-interface landscape. They may represent a nickel on Microsoft’s dollar, but their nickel is a collector’s item, polished and pretty.
So, it’s great that Apple explodes once again into the mainstream with a device that costs too much, doesn’t do all that many terrific things, and is just sort of trendy. They deserve it. It’s fun to watch. I wonder what it will mean in a year or two.