Time magazine has published a three-page article on the creation of the iPod nano and its replacement of the iPod mini.
“It’s amazing that the nano even made it to the stage,” writes Time’s Lev Grossman. “The story of the nano started nine months ago, when Jobs and his team took a look at the iPod mini and decided they could make it better.
On the face of it, that wouldn’t appear to be a fantastically smart decision. The iPod mini was and still is the best-selling MP3 player in the world, and Apple had introduced it only 11 months earlier. Jobs was proposing to fix something that decidedly was not broken.”
The article also includes some choice quotes from Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
“The more we started to talk about what this could be,” Jobs said, “it wasn’t long before I said, ‘You know, what if we just bet our future on this? Is that possible?’ And everybody immediately looked pretty scared. Including me.”
“What’s really been great for us is the iPod has been a chance to apply Apple’s incredibly innovative engineering in an area where we don’t have a 5%-operating-system-market-share glass ceiling,” Jobs said. “And look at what’s happened.
