Wired magazine’s on-line variant has a great article on how Apple went about developing the iPod. The story is a shows how product development should happen and why Apple keeps getting better.

Here are some choice bits:

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” Jobs told the Times. “That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” 

The iPod name came from an earlier Apple project to build an internet kiosk, which never saw the light of day. On July 24, 2000, Apple registered the iPod name for “a public internet kiosk enclosure containing computer equipment,” according to the filing.

Jonathan Ive, Apple’s vice president of industrial design, made prototype after prototype.

‘’Steve made some very interesting observations very early on about how this was about navigating content,'’ Ive told The New York Times. ‘’It was about being very focused and not trying to do too much with the device — which would have been its complication and, therefore, its demise. The enabling features aren’t obvious and evident, because the key was getting rid of stuff.'’

The drive was 1.8 inches in diameter — considerably smaller than the 2.5-inch Fujitsu drive used in competing players — but Toshiba didn’t have any idea what it might be used for.

“They said they didn’t know what to do with it. Maybe put it in a small notebook,” Rubinstein recalled. “I went back to Steve and I said, ‘I know how to do this. I’ve got all the parts.’ He said, ‘Go for it.’”

Read it all here: LINK