| Wednesday, January 10, 2007 |
09:29 - Whither iPod?
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A while ago, while comparing the iPod and Zune form factors, I said:
It also explains why people are waiting so eagerly for the fabled "True Video iPod", the one with the screen that's supposed to cover the entire rectangular face of the device and feature an integrated touch-screen that fades a software version of the scroll wheel into view when you touch it. On paper, it seems the ideal solution. The fact that it would necessarily eschew buttons that go "click" when you push them, and would pick up fingerprints and annoying scratches all the more easily, and would require some extra non-software way to poke the thing if it locked up and you had to reboot it, makes me skeptical that this is at all the solution Apple has in mind, though.
Well, whaddya know. Seems Apple had the same thought: if your controls are going to be "soft", with a touch-screen and a pointing device manipulating controls that are created in software on demand, then you've got the same kind of paradigm shift in interface that they had in moving the controls of iTunes onto a mobile device in the first place. Apple learned long ago from the debacle that was QuickTime 4 that rather than trying to recreate the controls from one medium in a medium that doesn't support them—like by making a virtual thumb-wheel volume control in a software video player—you should use controls that work within the constraints of the medium you're working with, and take advantage of its good points too. So the iPod, instead of having a slider for volume (which would have been unwieldy and imprecise), used the scroll wheel, which took advantage of the human thumb's natural tendency to move in a stroking, circular path. It turned the hand into a cylinder and piston, which turns out to work quite well.
But it's dependent upon the ability to physically move a piece of plastic in that same circular path, which is why the touch-sensitive versions of the click wheel have never been quite as tactilely satisfying as the physically rotating wheel of the first-generation iPod: your thumb slides along the surface and you have to consciously guide it in a circle, rather than stiction keeping your thumbtip in contact with the part of the wheel you're touching as it rotates, the circular path coming from its natural movement. And a touch-sensitive screen with no implicit boundaries would only have exacerbated that problem. So rather than trying to emulate the wheel in software, Apple shook itself to wakefulness, cast off its self-imposed constraint of sticking to known and iconic interface elements, and threw out the wheel metaphor altogether.
The multi-touch interface is so dang cool, they're going to have to put it on the rest of the iPods soon—if not the nanos, then at least the full-size iPods, the ones with the 80GB drives, ten times the size of the one in the $600 iPhone. Those of us who buy iPods primarily for their all-encompassing capacity, so we can carry whole seasons of TV shows around with us without a care about manually picking which ones to sync and which ones to leave behind, can't be satisfied with a mere 8GB. And we'll take an iPod with a full-size hard drive over one with wireless and phone capabilities any day.
Next to the iPhone, the interface of the current iPod looks like a 1984 Mac next to OS X. It's crisp and clean, but it's not cool anymore. I have to imagine that the June iPhone debut will coincide with a rollout of a whole new iPod lineup: the nano and shuffle will probably stay unchanged, though the nano's screen might get an upgrade, just to incorporate the iPhone's color scheme and navigation elements. But the full-size iPod might well lose its click wheel, in favor of a multi-touch interface like the one on the iPhone. Sure, it won't look as iconic as people are accustomed. But these days, the click wheel is not, in and of itself, an asset. It's been compromised over the years by well-intentioned efforts to miniaturize the technology and consolidate the controls for reliability, and it's no longer the overwhelming slam-dunk that the first-gen iPod's wheel was. What's more, Apple seems to have come up with something even better.
Who else could have?
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Brian Tiemann
