tdeffen

More Apple Punditry

I wrote this e-mail back in the middle of April 2010 to John Gruber of Daring Fireball after pondering the situation with iPods for a bit. The subject was titled “The War on Bloat”, which in retrospect is really stupid. But I believe the gist of the message is right, and on Wednesday we’ll have a very interesting new iPod lineup.

I wanted to have a conversation about the future of traditional iPods. I know the Mac has been put on the back burner in favor of iPhone OS, but I’m curious about what happens to Apple’s third leg of the stool. (And please forgive me if this sounds like a Gizmodian rant; it would be my greatest shame.)

Recently you linked to a 2003 NYT story in your post about iPads being used as an e-reader for blind people, (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/04/12/ipad-ereader-blind) called “Guts of the Machine”. The author interviewed Jony Ive, in which he recalled that Steve Jobs was “very focused and not trying to do too much with the device” during development. The whole article is about Apple not just slapping components together, but stripping away features down to a well-designed, straightforward, ultra-useable object. In fact, this could be said about every product they work on: getting rid of unnecessary elements and features (bloat) and instead focusing on doing a few things very well.
Recall the first model of the iPod, the default main menus contained:

Playlists 
Artists 
Songs  
Contacts 
Settings 

The lack of photos and videos makes sense since the device had a low-resolution monochrome screen, but with three of the five menu options pertaining to music, it is clear what purpose this thing was meant to serve.
When I went to the Apple store to pick up an iPad, I played around with some of the iPods. Now on the iPod nano default menu, there is: 

Music 
Videos 
Photos 
Podcasts 
Radio 
Video Camera 
Extras 
Settings 
Shuffle Songs 

And extending to the bottom of the screen, an album art showcase. It’s a very good example of the feature-creep that affects many multi-generational devices. 
Of course one could say that with a nice screen, displaying pictures and videos are now necessary features, and thus not bloat. To me this seems to devalue the primary purpose of the device (for me, at least): to play audio. iPods are most associated with music, after all. One could also say that if I wanted to return to the simplicity of the early iPods, I could simply remove those features from the main menu. These are quibbles, I know, but the iPod no longer has the minimalistic, almost zen-like attitude it used to embody.*
My whole reason for this email is to set up the question: Do you think, with Apple’s focus on simplicity, ease-of-use, and excellent user experience, that Apple will discontinue Click Wheel iPods in favor of iPhone OS devices? If not that, do you think we will see a smaller, streamlined version of the iPhone OS, perhaps without third-party apps, that is meant primarily for the consumption of music, photos, and videos? Or do you think none of this is even a problem, and Apple will continue producing Click Wheel-based iPods, priced below the iPod touches? Or with all the recent iPad/iPhone OS excitement, have you thought about where the iPod is headed?

*With any of the iPhone OS devices, I don’t get the feeling of complexity and bloat, even though it is more of a general purpose computer device. Maybe that’s because almost every function is grouped together and hidden away.