Word: nano
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West is there to add some razzle to a press event held by Apple Computer. Minutes earlier, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod Nano, the absurdly tiny, unbearably sexy successor to the iPod Mini. To be fair to West, it's a tough act to follow...
...amazing that the Nano even made it to the stage. The story of the Nano started nine months ago, when Jobs and his team took a look at the iPod Mini and decided they could make it better. On the face of it, that wouldn't appear to be a fantastically smart decision. The iPod Mini was and still is the best-selling MP3 player in the world, and Apple had introduced it only 11 months earlier. Jobs was proposing to fix something that decidedly was not broken. "Not very many companies are bold enough to shoot their best-selling...
People expect consumer electronics to keep getting smaller, as though it were a natural process like grass growing, but it doesn't happen by itself. The Nano may seem superficially iPod-esque on the outside, but on the inside it has been completely, painstakingly, exhaustively re-engineered. Older iPods (except for the low-capacity iPod Shuffle) have miniature hard drives in them, but the Nano is built around a chunk of solid-state Flash memory. The screen is all new too. Because it's smaller, the Nano's screen has to be sharper to be readable. (It ended up being...
...that's just the obvious stuff. The click wheel on the front had to be reinvented to fit the Nano's ridiculously slim 6.9-mm profile. Ditto the battery and chips. "We use every fraction of a millimeter of space to get things in there," says Apple senior vice president Phil Schiller. "It's like a puzzle to fit all that stuff together. It has the tightest tolerances of anything we've ever made in the history of this company...
Developing an electronic circuit from nano-scale elements has long been a research goal, but previous attempts only managed to create circuits of 100 hertz frequency, which is too low for use in most applications...