Simon & Schuster, 2006. 284pp. $25.00.
Reviewed by Patrick Hunnicutt
11.16.06

There’s no such thing as a perfect product, unless of course it’s the iPod. The global phenomenon that allows listeners to carry whole libraries of music in their pockets was first released five years ago, and as of today Apple has sold more than 43 million iPods, as well as a billion songs over its iTunes music store (which opened in 2003). The player has been vital in fueling Apple’s rise from near-bankruptcy to the heights of being a major player in both the computer and electronics industries.

Given that the technology changes so rapidly, a history of this digital revolution is already due. Steven Levy, the tech reporter for NewsweekThe Perfect Thing: How The iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness. Levy is absolutely the right man for the job; he has been tracking Apple since its 1984 inception and he has access to both industry heavies, Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his rival Bill Gates, with whom he gets to discuss the iPod and pretty much anything else. He even includes in the book a “heated discussion” with Bill Gates on the nature of cool (Gates, who is a numbers man at heart, has trouble defining the word “cool” without also using the term “market share,” and he asserts, in seriousness, that Microsoft Word is a cool product on par with the iPod).

Levy, an unabashed lover of his own iPod, kicks off the book with the question that bedevils us all: “Just what is it about the iPod?” Less a history than a collection of stand-alone essays, The Perfect Thing examines various aspects of the iPod obsession, all narrowing in on the answer. Some sections are historical and others explore the more far-reaching implications of the phenomenon; one looks at how peoples’ identities are defined by their song playlists, another analyzes the concept of shuffling.

These discussions are enjoyable and are often revelatory in their consideration of the device’s cultural and psychological impact, but the substance of Levy’s book is the play-by-play of how Jobs and Apple took the far lead in the digital music revolution and maintained that lead with an ever-evolving line of products and software. The book covers the pre-digital era (remember the Sony Walkman?), the advent of the mp3 file and the resulting frenzy of illegal file-sharing, and finally those first primitive digital music players, most of which couldn’t hold a full album. Levy describes an online music download scene rife with legal skirmishes, as the record labels, fearing the death of the album, fought fruitlessly against the tide of digital music. When they sued listeners for stealing music, the listeners just kept stealing, and at one point the labels even tried (unsuccessfully) to make digital players illegal.

Before Apple, nobody had “cracked the code” to solve the digital music problem in a way that would benefit the labels and the artists. When Apple released the first iPod one month after 9/11, it seemed at first that the little wonder was simply a swell incentive to attract new Mac users. But the iPod quickly proved itself to be bigger than that; when Apple expanded its compatibility to PCs, the floodgates opened. The iPod became a sensation and the music labels were finally convinced that this digital music trend wasn’t going away. That paved the way for Steve Jobs to become the peacemaker between the music industry and the world of file-sharing software. In 2002, Jobs did what nobody else had managed to do. He met with all the big music executives and after much negotiation (e.g. the labels agreeing to sell songs individually instead of just as albums, Jobs agreeing to restrict the playability of each purchased song to only five computers) they came up with Apple’s iTunes music store, which sold songs for ninety-nine cents a pop.

So what is it about the iPod? For starters, Levy devotes a good deal of attention to the look and design: “It weighs 6.4 ounces and consists of a few layers of circuit boards and electronic components, covered by a skin of white polycarbonate and stainless steel. It’s slightly smaller than a deck of cards.” He also points out some of its intriguing quirks (such as the absence of an on/off switch). From interviews, Levy brings us into the board meetings where the iPod was workshopped and where Jobs and his team of engineers came up with a design which, though much-evolved over the last five years, has always maintained an elegant and minimalist aesthetic. Jony Ive, the top iPod engineer, claims that the key has been to “[get] design out of the way.” Virginia Postrel, Levy’s expert on industrial design, suggests that “There’s a tactile quality to [the iPod], and yet it’s very, very modern and sleek. [...] So it kind of has that nice warm-cool, hard-soft, masculine-feminine, modern-comfortable mix.”

But the iPod always promised more than sleek looks and huge capacity: it offers status, and its cachet has only increased with each new group (celebrities, artists, college kids) that has embraced it. Owning an iPod brings you that much closer to the hipster euphoria envisioned in the TV ads that feature black-silhouetted figures, white iPod in hand, dancing in front of a bright neon background. Levy points out that Apple is “exploiting the aesthetic appeal” of its products, so much so that the iPod is now as much a fashion accessory as it is a music player.

According to Levy, Steve Jobs and Apple did just about everything right in creating the most desirable product of the 21st century. While The Perfect Thing contains some brief criticisms of Jobs and the iPod (Levy is convinced his shuffle feature isn’t random), the book on the whole is a happy celebration of good, life-improving technology in an age when so many things don’t seem to work the way we want them to. For those of you, like me, who lived through the Napster hay-day and followed the iPod story as it unfolded over these last years, it’s no less fascinating to have Levy guide us through the familiar territory and put all the pieces together again.

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