[IxDA Discuss] Yet Another iPod Birth Story

[Dave Chiu]

Not to instigate a thread regression, but FWIW, there's another  
(older) article in Wired about the birth of the iPod (Wired seems to  
like these kinds of stories!):

Inside Look at Birth of the IPod: http://www.wired.com/news/mac/ 
0,64286-0.html

The part I find particularly interesting concerns the polycarbonate  
containers they placed the components into while testing  
functionality. In the most recent article all that's said about them is:

> To make them easy to debug, prototypes were built inside  
> polycarbonate containers about the size of a large shoebox.
(Straight Dope on the IPod's Birth: http://wired.com/news/columns/ 
cultofmac/0,71956-1.html)

But in the older article:
> Knauss said all the iPod prototypes -- and there were several --  
> were sealed tight inside a reinforced plastic box about the size of  
> a shoebox.
>
> "They put the buttons and the screen in creative locations all over  
> the box so people couldn't tell what product was inside it and how  
> small it was," Knauss said. "They always put the controls in  
> different places -- the scroll wheel on the side, the screen on the  
> top -- to make sure it wasn't predictable what the end design was.  
> The only thing accessible was the jacks."
...making the whole "birth of the iPod" story rather Rashomon-esque.

dave