So many successful tech products are called “iconic” these days that the honorary title has been seriously devalued. In the case of Apple’s iPod, however, it’s a perfect fit. And if you conjure up a classic iPod in your mind, you probably envision several things, each iconic in their own right.

There’s the sleek white plastic front in its most familiar shape and the stainless steel back. The scroll wheel that allows you to browse hundreds or even thousands of songs. The small screen that initially only displayed monochrome text in Chicago, a typeface that dated back to Apple’s original Mac.

For Tony Fadell, however, iPod memories are just as likely to involve their interiors. Fadell is one of the creators of the iPhone, the co-founder and former CEO of Nest, an active investor and, as of this month, a book author. But he’s probably most often described as the “father of the iPod”.

Therefore, looking at a photo of the insides of a particular iPod model reminds him of the design challenges it presented. “You say, ‘Oh, I remember we had to move this because of this reason, we had to move this, or we had noise issues,'” he says. “When you see these things, it just takes you back.”

The images that travel Fadell’s mind back in time were created by Lumafield, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup that uses CT (computed tomography) scanning technology to look inside an object, collect data on what it contains, then reconstruct it in 3D. Digital image. In addition to iPods, the company scanned other iconic items such as Lego minifigures, Nintendo Game Boys, Polaroid cameras and Heinz ketchup bottles.

Lumafield began sharing footage on its Scan of the Month site last November, long before the company exited stealth mode in April. Indeed, showing the inside of familiar products is just an entertaining and highly viral side activity. More importantly, the startup aims to democratize the use of CT for quality control purposes in product development and manufacturing, areas where it has always had enormous potential but in many cases prohibitive cost. .

“This technology has been around for a long time, but these systems typically cost a million dollars,” says Lumafield co-founder and CEO Eduardo Torrealba. “We did some pretty crazy engineering to bring the cost down to $36,000 a year.” Early adopters of the company’s Neptune CT scanner and Voyager software include L’Oreal, Saucony and Trek Bicycle.

Fadell’s interest in Lumafield isn’t an exercise in iPod nostalgia: he’s an investor in the company through his company, Future Shape. “As soon as I saw [the scanner], I said, ‘How soon can I write a check?’ “, he says. “Because at the end of the day, visualizing and going into detail about things made of atoms is very difficult, especially when you have to take them apart and put them back together every time.”

He adds, “Another reason you need Lumafield is because we do 3D stacking of chips – dies on dies on dies. We have to dig deep, and it’s only going to get more complex.

The fact that many gadgets are now water resistant further complicates matters: “As soon as you open them, you ruin the seals,” he says. “You can’t put them back together, it’s kind of a unique design. And so be able to watch [inside] that and inspecting it is a superpower.

1,000 songs on a fragile little hard drive

When Fadell ran Apple’s iPod group, “we never had an X-ray machine,” he laments. He certainly could have used one, since Apple’s MP3 players were full of ambitious, sometimes risky feats of engineering. (Apple eventually sought out a CT scanner to help design the iPhone.)

When the original iPod was announced on October 23, 2001, its defining proposition over existing MP3 players was summed up in its soon-to-be famous slogan: “1,000 songs in your pocket”. This selling point – a bit mind-boggling at the time – was made possible by the tiny 5GB hard drive the iPod used for storage instead of a flash memory chip capable of holding only an album or two. .

The same consumers who treated their laptops with care were accustomed to throwing existing portable music players such as the Sony Discman into a purse or leaving them vibrating in a car. Apple wasn’t going to train them to do anything else with an iPod. According to Fadell, Toshiba, the drive’s manufacturer, thought this was a recipe for disaster. “When you have a rotating stand and you’re going to drop it, you don’t know what it’s going to do,” he says. “Toshiba said to me, ‘You’re crazy, you’ll never make a portable music player out of this, the player is going to break down.'”

Apple forged ahead with its plans and transformed the way people listened to music. But the company knew that the bulk and fragility of hard drives were downsides. From the start, he looked forward to the day when high-capacity flash storage would be affordable enough to fit into an iPod. “We were always doing competitive stuff and going, ‘Oh, the flash is growing,'” Fadell says.

The first flash-based iPod was the 2005 iPod Shuffle, which was barely identifiable as a spin-off of the original iPod: it was the size of a pack of chewing gum, had no screen and could only play music in shuffle mode. The entry-level $99 model only had room for 120 songs.

However, eight months later, Apple replaced the hard drive-equipped iPod Mini with the flash-based iPad Nano. Flash memory was still expensive enough that the $199 version held 512 songs, with a 1,000 song model available for $249. But the big news was that the high-performance Nano was toddler, and thinner than a #2 pencil, which Apple could never have done if there had been a disc inside. It made for one of Steve Jobs’ most surprising speeches.

When Fadell talks about the Nano, the first technical challenge he brings up is battery life. The device’s svelte dimensions required “a much smaller battery than the large full-size battery that was on the Classic [iPod] or even on the Mini,” he says. The iPod team was able to squeeze enough life out of the Nano’s nano-battery to promise up to 14 hours of music playback, the same claim Apple made for the entry-level iPod available on the market. ‘era.

But once the drive was in the hands of consumers, an anticipated problem arose. Users tended to put their tall, skinny iPad Nanos in their back pockets and then sit on them. If the Nano flexed, it could damage the circuit boards inside. To complicate matters, pressing the Click Wheel would sometimes apply enough pressure to cause the map to work again, temporarily.

“We were getting all these weird intermittent errors,” recalls Fadell. “If we could have looked inside with a machine like the Lumafield machine, we could have diagnosed it much faster.”

Beyond the iPod

The first Nano might have been the culmination of the iPod lineup as a tapestry for Apple’s imagination and engineering chops. And at the time of its release, work on the iPhone was well advanced. Apple’s phone would be loaded with technologies not found in iPods: a large multi-touch screen, a cellular modem, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cameras, etc.

Still, Fadell, who oversaw the iPhone hardware, says all the expertise in miniaturized electronics the company gained from iPods was directly applicable to the iPhone project. After all, until the arrival of the iPod, Apple’s smallest computing devices were laptops, which were behemoths by 2022 standards.

“When we got there, Apple didn’t understand anything about 0402 resistors and capacitors, like very small things,” says Fadell.

Even before the iPhone became a reality, Apple knew that an MP3 player with flash storage wasn’t the future of music. Internally, the company had been talking all along about a concept it called “the celestial jukebox”: music stored in the cloud and streamed to a handheld gadget, as Pandora, Spotify and Apple would eventually do. Music. “We knew the next big thing after The Flash was everything your music, not 1,000 songs or 10,000 songs,” Fadell says.

Like everything your music in your pocket has come true, iPods in their original form are gone. In 2014, Apple discontinued the iPod Classic, the last direct descendant of the full-size model from 2001. The latest iterations of the Nano and the Shuffle met the same fate three years later. And earlier this month the company announced it would end sales of the iPod Touch, more of an iPhone without a phone than a music player, but still the last product to carry the iPod name.

Although the iPod is now officially gone, it is hardly forgotten. Lumafield CEO Torrealba says the startup is inspired by how quickly Fadell and his team brought the original model to market more than 20 years ago. Now that Lumafield has deconstructed iPods with its Neptune scanner, it plans to continue using its technology to celebrate other classic technologies.

“There are a lot of devices that people are really interested in,” says Torrealba. “Being able to highlight this truly amazing engineering that goes into these hidden details is something we want to be able to do with Scan of the Month, in perpetuity, as a company.”

As for Fadell, he refuses to think of the iPod in the past tense. “The Apple II brand no longer exists, but it does, it’s the cornerstone of the company,” he says. “The iPod is the cornerstone of the company. The iPhone would never have existed without the iPod. The iPod will never go away whether or not there is a product with that name. The engineering that made it all possible is one of the main reasons.