Word: ipodding
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...just led Apple on a triumphant rampage through a new market sector, portable digital-music players, and he was looking around for more technology to conquer. He found the ideal target sitting on his hip. Consumers bought nearly a billion cell phones last year, 10 times the number of iPods in circulation. Break off just 1% of that, and you can buy yourself a lot of black turtlenecks. "It was unanimous that this should be it," Jobs says. "It wasn't even by a little, it was by a mile. It was the hardest one too." Apple's new iPhone...
...game is a little different this time. With the iPod, Jobs essentially created a whole new product category. The cell-phone turf is already held by entrenched armies of phonemakers and service providers. They may not be as hip or innovative as Apple, but they will shred one another for nickels, and there are a lot of nickels on the ground. One point of market share in the handset business is worth $1.4 billion. Motorola, having sold more than 50 million Razrs with not enough to show for it, will probably be reverse engineering the iPhone before it hits...
That was why, 212 years ago, Jobs sicced his wrecking crew of designers and engineers on the cell phone as we know--and hate-- it. They began by melting the face off a video iPod. No clickwheel, no keypad. They sheared off the entire front and replaced it with a huge, bright, vivid screen--that touch screen Jobs got so excited about a few paragraphs ago. When you need to dial, it shows you a keypad; when you need other buttons, the screen serves them up. When you want to watch a video, the buttons disappear. Suddenly, the interface...
Into that iPod they stuffed a working version of Apple's operating system, OS X, so that the phone could handle real, nontoy applications like Web browsers and e-mail clients. They put in a cell antenna and two more antennas for wi-fi and Bluetooth, plus a bunch of sensors, so that the phone knows how bright its screen should be and whether it should display vertically or horizontally, and when it should turn off the touch screen so that you don't accidentally operate it with your...
Then Jonathan Ive, Apple's head of design--the Englishman who shaped the iMac and the iPod--squashed the case to less than half an inch thick and widened it to what looks like a bar of expensive chocolate wrapped in aluminum and stainless steel. The iPhone is a typical piece of Ive design: an austere, abstract, Platonic-looking form that somehow also manages to feel warm and organic and ergonomic. Unlike my phone. Ive picks it up and points out four little nubbins on the back. "Your phone's got feet on," he says, not unkindly. "Why would anybody...