making the ipod and the iphone

The Daring Fireball podcast "The Talk Show" briefly mentioned Pixo - they made the OS that all the classic iPods ran. I can't find many videos focusing on the OS in action, alas, but it had such a beautiful look, and was so elegantly merged with the famous iPod clickwheel that it's almost hard to believe it wasn't from Apple itself.

It's easy to forget how amazing "1,000 songs in your pocket" was. Certainly that was something my PalmPilot wasn't doing then! And when the main competitors of the time were a skipping CD-man with like 12-20 tracks, or a linear tape system with the same kind of limitations where you can't skip tracks, really... it's stunning. (Also stunning is how relying on local music storage of any kind indicates you're a bit of an old fogey...)

Researching that, the super-crude prototypes for the first iPhone also make for some interesting reading... both are as astonishingly ugly as the iPod was beautiful!

Also: here's a cool but old  video about "The Future of iPod". I love these attempts to predict the "next" iPod or iPhone, made way back when.  Some are clearly parodies, but others are serious, and some more or less land on the simplicity the first iPhone offered - and then there are ones that presume the scroll wheel was a critical identity element, so they throw in a virtual onscreen version.