Lord of the Links

Steve Jobs has done an earth shattering job with the iPod, and now comes the iPod Nano, which enshrines Apple as the undisputed things of all things Cool!

The Nano may seem superficially iPod-esque on the outside, but on the inside it has been completely, painstakingly, exhaustively re-engineered. Older iPods (except for the low-capacity iPod Shuffle) have miniature hard drives in them, but the Nano is built around a chunk of solid-state Flash memory. The screen is all new too. Because it's smaller, the Nano's screen has to be sharper to be readable. (It ended up being so sharp, it shows one line of text more than the Mini's screen does. In color too.)

Reinventing their highest selling product (iPod Mini) which did seem to have anything wrong, was a very bold step, and required a lot of gumption, and visionary thinking.

That apart, design is what sets Nano apart. The article ends with Jobs saying that the same technology (Mac) in a non-monopolistic environment enabled them to capture consumer's thoughts. Somewhere, there is still a sour feeling in the mouth!