He once showed me a notebook in which he had sketched every possible knob, lever, button or control device before settling on the idea of the wheel, and everything on an Apple product is similarly considered, explored, improved and designed to be as easy and as uncluttered as possible. That it is simple to use and just so damn desirable is down to Apple's small, close-knit design team, led by Ive, a 42-year-old from Chigwell in Essex. That it works so well with your computer and the online store, is down to the iTunes software.
"It could have been shaped like a banana if we'd wanted," said Jonathan Ive, Apple's senior vice president of industrial design, when we talked about the first iPod. We all now routinely carry huge libraries of music around on our phones and the music industry, meanwhile, is almost unrecognisable: a worried, slimmed-down shadow of its former bloated self. Apple has shown just how wrong that assumption was by selling 220m iPods worldwide, and more than 8.5bn downloads via its online iTunes store. Like a lovesick spouse who refuses to believe the honeymoon is over even after the divorce papers have been served, the big music labels stubbornly club to the notion that we'd all prefer the sound quality of a CD to the convenience of digital.
If you cared anything at all about music, as soon as you held it and understood how easy it was to use, you wanted one. In contrast, the iPod was a sleek digital jukebox that fitted snugly in the palm of your hand it could hold one thousand songs – to begin with – and allowed you access to them in just a couple of clicks of its elegant navigation wheel.
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The others were fiddly, trivial-looking plastic things cluttered with buttons and dials, appealing mainly to gadget-obsessed geeks with the time to figure out how to work them. And set against the digital music players then on the market, the iPod was a revelation. "This is a major breakthrough," Apple boss Steve Jobs said, gazing into the future. But when the first iPod was launched at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California on 23 October 2001, it was revolutionary. I t looks clunky, even clumsy compared to the more evolved versions that followed.
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