THE GOOD OLD NAUGHTS

Why don’t editors push writers harder, especially for special “theme” issues (does the TIMES mag do any “regular” issues anymore)? Rob Walker’s iPod story last week quoted Steve Jobs as saying "People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." That’s the Apple philosophy right there, and it cries out for unpacking. Instead, we go inside the guts of the iPod and learn there’s a tiny hard drive. But the integration of design and engineering is the key reason this item is such a phenomenon and why its imitators lag so far behind. This union between the technical and the intuitive is so clean, so seamless, that it’s the nose on the face of the product and the experience. But there aren’t any talks with the engineers who articulated this marriage in form, nor from envious outsiders who wish they worked for Apple development.

Another missed angle is Apple’s new AAC (“advanced audio compression”) format, which assaults the mp3 standard. I’ve done side-by-side comparisons with WAV files, and simply cannot hear the difference, and this is with AAC files at 128, SMALLER than the weakest sounding mp3. So now that even Windows users are can listen to entire collections compressed to this level with little or no signal loss, and carry more than we can possibly listen to on a week’s vacation, aren’t CDs in for a pretty glorious sunset?

Any article I read on iPod I want to know how it overcame its totally uncool name. Finally, I picked up mine when I learned about Belkin’s transformative microphone/speakers, which turns the unit into a voice recorder. Now I can not only travel with hi-fi sound, I have my interview recorder in the same unit, and can also read edocuments, ebooks, and store contact info. It was a no-brainer for me: I’d rather devote more space to sound than anything else, and I never got off jotting notes on a Palm, especially when I have the option of taking simple voice notes.

Now if they’d just figure out the hack for track overlap, one of my favorite iTunes features. Tips?