The iPod at 20: the one that started it all

Apple provided an unsolicited reminder on Monday of just how much disposable income I’ve channeled its way over the last 20 years. It wasn’t pretty. The company’s latest Event (grandiose capital E intended) opened with a slick video of a bespectacled youth in his garage (Silicon Valley, we presume) firing up old Apple devices to sample their start-up chimes, thumbwheel clicks and even the snap of an AirPods case being closed. The samples were then combined into a piece of vibrant groove music with which to fanfare CEO Tim Cook, apparently standing in a field outside the Apple campus in Cupertino, for his introduction to the company’s presentation of new MacBooks for, mostly, creatives.

As the 90-second clip spun past, I caught sight of an original ‘jelly-coloured’ iMac, and the first iPod, which was launched 20 years ago today. These were the gateway drugs that hooked me on Apple, committing me to at least three generations of iMac, four iPods and their natural successor, the iPhone, along with iPads, MacBooks-numerous, a MacMini, and an entire drawer full of accessories for all of them. All in the space of 20 years. I shudder to think how much it has all cost.

To go back a little further, I started using Apple products professionally in the early 1990s, learning the art of desktop publishing and layout work for magazines and print advertising on the job thanks to intuitive hardware and software that made it so easy. On my first morning in Sky TV’s Creative Services department I was sat in front of a Mac, shown how to use QuarkXPress and Adobe Illustrator, and six weeks later I was driving past a 96-sheet billboard for The Simpsons on the A3 that I’d designed myself. I would subsequently spend hours drooling at Apple laptops in the window of a high-end computer dealer in Chiswick, like Mike Myers coveting the white Stratocaster in Wayne’s World. Alas, they were all well beyond my pay packet. Then, in 1998, Apple launched the iMac, and instantly made home computer ownership fun, accessible and, to a certain extent, affordable. I eventually bought one in early 2001 when I moved to Silicon Valley myself. My apartment was a 10-minute straight-line drive from the Apple HQ in Cupertino, which meant that I was soon drinking the local Kool-Aid. 

Armed with a relocation allowance, I bought an iMac from the local Fry’s Electronics toy shed, the very first PC I’d ever owned that hadn’t been provided for me by an employer. By acquiring that iMac I’d bought into the “digital lifestyle” that Steve Jobs had started pitching. “Rather than just hear about megahertz and megabytes,” an Apple press release for the iMac trilled at the time, “customers can now learn and experience the things they can actually do with a computer, like make movies, burn custom music CDs, and publish their digital photos on a personal website.” In other words, a ‘digital hub’. All these things were still embryonic (especially the idea of uploading anything to this new-fangled thing called ‘the Internet’), but Jobs had the uncanny ability of envisaging the technology people needed - or didn’t know they needed yet - and unlike most major figures in the tech world, had the charisma to sell it to them. 

Even in 2001, some time after the Dot Com bubble had burst, Jobs was able to apply his quasi-rock star appeal (well, as close to rock star as a technology leader could resemble) to turning the functional business tool that most PCs were into a desirable piece of a consumer electronics. Key to this was a shift in connectivity that Jobs had foreseen, particularly enabled by the emergence of FireWire technology that could attach digital cameras and other peripherals to PCs, enabling content to be quickly extracted and then, with easy-to-use software, turned into something creative. Thus, he commenced the ‘consumerisation’ of professional applications, turning applications like Final Cut Pro into iMovie, which enabled anyone to make something polished of their holiday videos (the same philosophy was applied to making music with GarageBand, launched in 2004, providing anyone with a Mac - and, now, even an iPhone and an iPad - with the means to record their own compositions).

2001 was a significant year in many ways. Whether it was the arrival of the actual year of Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey, or the first year-proper of the 21st century, in technology terms, it was the year that Apple moved into fifth gear. When I arrived in California in March that year, the previous decades consumer tech boom was already giving way to other things, like biotech and healthtech (“Tech of all kinds – we already sound like 15th century Mexico,”, if I can borrow Boris Johnson’s dad joke the other day…). Apple, however, was laying the foundations of the imperiousness that, by 2020, made it the first US company to exceed a market cap of $2 trillion. Today it has a higher value than the GDP of Russia, Canada, South Korea and Italy.

On 9 January, 2001, Jobs announced iTunes, an app partly purloined from elsewhere (SoundJam) which, in a music industry-baiting move, enabled CDs to be ripped using the latest version of the iMac’s optical drive, making it easy to build-up a personal digital music library, eventually allowing it to burn compilation CDs like mix tapes. I’d previously seen music stored digitally on a PC at former Skids frontman and TV presenter Richard Jobson’s house, and was enamoured by the idea of a digital jukebox. I didn’t care, particularly, about any perceived loss of sound quality from listening to compressed digital music as I just loved the simplicity of clickable access to music. 

What was missing, however, was portability. By the mid-1990s, the travelling music fan still had to pack CDs and even cassettes to listen to on clunky portable players. Sony’s MiniDisc at least attempted to miniaturise music into a smaller form factor, while Philips’ failed Digital Compact Cassette was merely a means of extending patent revenue from the humble magnetic tape with the addition of digital recording. Audiophiles gave both DCC and MiniDisc a notable swerve. The advent of the MP3 digital audio standard in 1994 led to various companies launching players, like Diamond’s Rio in 1998. Most, Steve Jobs told his executive team, according to biographer Walter Isaacson, “truly sucked”, and tasked Apple to produce one of its own. 

Jobs pulled together a team that included former Philips manager Tony Fadell (who’d worked on the Velo and Nino Windows CE devices I helped launch in the UK) and Apple’s hardware engineering lead, Jon Rubinstein, to come up with something better, challenging them to have something ready for an October unveiling ahead of the Christmas sales season. Isaacson’s seminal (and substantial) authorised biography Steve Jobs explains in forensic detail the process that saw the product take shape, with Jobs himself giving - as was his tendency - fastidious daily feedback on what he, as a music fan, wanted from the device, prescribing his desire to make the product simple to use, with navigation restricted to a “three clicks” maximum. Another of Jobs’ insights was that the device had to work with the iTunes app on the iMac, making the computer the primary interface for music library management. Further discussions were held, with Jobs now adding his views on the minutiae of things like the colour of the accompanying headphones, with Apple design chief Jonny Ive throwing in his thoughts on the product’s white-and-polished stainless steel colour scheme. Then came a back-and-forth about the device’s marketing, with the eventual execution of “1,000 songs in your pocket” emanating from one of the Apple CEO’s encounters with Toshiba in Japan, who first flagged the idea of a 5-gigabyte hard drive that could store such an amount of music.

On 23 October 2001, the result of all this rapid endeavour was revealed. Barely a month after 9/11, a world numbed by the atrocity was introduced to the iPod. This would be the device which, arguably, set in train Apple’s evolution and light the touch paper of a technology-led transformation of cultural life and even social behaviour. Journalists had been invited to Cupertino for what was, by today’s standards, a relatively modest Apple event, but one in which they’d been teased cryptically - “Hint: it’s not a Mac.” On stage, Jobs theatrically produced from his jeans a small white device to which he  declared: “This amazing little device holds a thousand songs, and it goes right in my pocket.” 

Compared to the 160GB capacity iPods Apple would later offer, the 5GB hard drive of that first model seems modest now, but surely a music player capable of storing 1,000 songs had instant appeal? Not, according to some critics, who branded the device too expensive at $399 and limited in what it could do. Some even went as far as suggesting that Jobs and Apple had, once again, bitten off more than the brand could chew, the last time being the failed Newton PDA. But Jobs stuck to his conviction: “Music is a part of everyone’s life,” he said, “and because it’s a part of everyone’s life, it’s a very large target market all around the world. It knows no boundaries.” 

We didn’t know it at the time, but this was a very loaded statement about where Apple would go as it broadened out of being just the ‘cool’ computer brand. Sales of that first iPod, and the quickly added second, 10GB, model weren’t stellar, but in the months after 9/11 the world understandably had other things on its mind. Apple, though, had done it again, introducing something that already existed and created a category out of it. History has been more kind to the first iPods, with many believing that it was the first truly great MP3 player. Jobs’ instincts about the digital music player field had been right. The iPod was a milestone in portable audio, but more importantly, it sparked Apple’s transformation from relatively esoteric computer brand, somewhat secretly - and smugly - coveted by creative professionals, to become one of the biggest companies on the planet. 

That first iPod and its many descendants would ultimately give way to the iPhone (the iPod Touch is even a hybrid of both), in which Apple repeated the principle all over again and reinvented the nascent smartphone category which, in turn, would turbocharge the digital lifestyle Jobs had imagined with the iMac to begin with. It’s worth remembering that in October 2001 there was no social media as we know it today, and Napster had been a relatively momentary irritation to the music industry, so the idea of a pocket device that could connect to always-on streaming services over super-fast, low-latency mobile networks was a long, long way off. Facebook was, back then, just a college dorm idea, so people weren’t uploading their holiday photographs to the Internet as they do now. Television was still linear, so in 2001, the notion of binge-watching an entire season of, say, The Sopranos, while sitting on the top deck of a bus was, frankly, not even a concept.

The iPhone has, of course, coalesced many functionalities into one platform - music, camera, television, cinema, e-mail, Web browsing and so on - but without the iPod to begin with, Apple might not have gone anywhere near phones, AirPods, iPads, TV set-top boxes or any one of the myriad product lines that I seem to have spent a stupid amount of my hard-earned on over 20 years. And you know what? I don’t regret a single penny of it. At one point in time I had the crazy idea of buying several iPod Shuffles, the inch-square music players with a 2GB capacity that were available in six colours. The idea was to have different genres of music on each of them, to be chosen per occasion or mood, like Thunderbirds’ Virgil Tracy choosing a pod (that word again) for Thunderbird 2 to fit the mission. Ludicrous, I know, but this is Apple’s marketing strength for you. While I resisted that idea, I’ve certainly succumbed to the iPod’s appeal, owning four. 

© Simon Poulter 2021

At the beginning of September I was digging around in that drawer of Apple bits-and-pieces and found the second iPod I owned - a third-generation, 30GB model from 2003, a fifth-generation model with a whopping 80GB capacity, a 16GB fourth-generation iPod Nano bought, on a whim, in Los Angeles, and a even cuter seventh-generation Nano bought, again, on a US trip in 2012. While hardly Indiana Jones stumbling across the Lost Ark, the discovery of that later Nano found its way into my pocket for the start of my return to office commuting. The firmware or the Bluetooth or some such aspect of its performance needs upgrading, but it still works. That, though, wasn’t the attraction of reviving it: it was the fact that the neat little music player, just 9cm long and weighing little more than a stack of credit cards, was such a sexy piece of technology, with its anodised aluminium casing and flash memory replacing the weighty hard drive of the original iPod.

When the definitive history of Apple Computer gets written, it will no doubt be the iPhone that commands the most attention, but the iPod deserves its place. In fact, more than that - it deserves acknowledgement for its singular contribution to culture. It has become, according to Leander Kahney, who wrote The Cult Of Mac, “the signature technology of the digital music era” and “profoundly” changed music culture. While Apple’s appeal until the iPod and certainly the iMac had certainly been amongst professional creatives, the iPod had a universal appeal. The Queen, it is claimed, has owned one, and the late German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld reportedly possessed more than 70 containing his entire CD collection, transporting them around the world in their own suitcase. “We had no idea this thing would get this huge,” Apple marketing executive Phil Schiller once told USA Today. 

In his book, Kahney draws attention to how the iPod would impact music listening in general, arguing that it ripped up the decades-old custom of listening to entire albums from start to finish and (even if ageing hipsters like me have embraced the vinyl revival), and that record ownership could only be visualised by shelved libraries of albums on various formats. Apart from anything else, Kahney says, with those white headphones plugged in, and the library stored on that hard drive, no-one needed to know what you were listening to, though as we all know, aggravating sound leakage from headphones readily gives away someone’s musical tastes, especially on public transport. Kaheny does, though, make the interesting point that the iPod may have even opened up musical tastes as people started experimenting with genres they’d previously not dipped into. The iPod also became a replacement for radio programming; ‘podcasts’ derived their name from the device, becoming an online sub-culture in their own right, with professional and amateur productions of all kinds covering every possible niche and mainstream interest; DJs took iPods into clubs to play tracks from them instead of turntables, mixing between multiple devices; and you could say that the iPod proliferated the entire business of music being available legally online. 

Whether Steve Jobs’ intention, in 1998 when he unveiled the iMac, was to turn Apple into the giant it is today is not fully known. The iPod, though, gave that process a significant kick, although compared with today’s marketing expenditure for Apple products, the company only spent $25 million on launching the first player in 2001, building its market share largely through word of mouth. Experts agree that the iPod’s appeal grew somewhat organically - an incongruous point given how Apple markets its products today. But whether by instinct or design, Jobs revelled in the “disruption” that technology wizards like talking about. 

Apple started out challenging the notion that computers could only be beige, and that managing them had to be clunky. Steve Jobs saw that technology offered something more rewarding in people’s lives - ironically, a vision that has proven stupendously rewarding for Apple itself.  The iPod was, perhaps, the point of origin for that vision, and I don’t think it hyperbolic to say that has directly influenced much of Apple’s product development history over the last 20 years. I don’t think it hyperbolic, either, to claim that the iPod and its lineage has contributed to a single-handed transformation of modern life. Which, I know, is quite a claim.

20 years on: the rebirth of cool...and Apple

Last Wednesday Apple reported quarterly earnings of $61.1 billion, almost $10 billion more than the same quarter a year ago. Its 2017 annual revenue was $229 billion. To put that into perspective, the UK's annual defence budget is about £50 billion. That Apple is loaded is common knowledge. That consumers like me are still prepared to fork out for premium-priced products to keep that turnover going says much about the company's brand resilience, despite it lacking any true, must-have innovations for some time.

But at risk of sounding like a Apple fanboy, my ownership of multiple iPhones, iPads, iPods, Macs (including the MacBook on which I write these words), is the product of an infatuation that began almost 30 years ago. In the very early 1990s I, like many others in the media professions, was introduced to the Mac as a production tool. Apple's desktops were in most newspaper and magazine offices as the digital, desktop publishing revolution transformed the business of ink. Working, first, on Apple's SE PCs, I migrated to larger machines as I moved from the Sky TV press office to the company's in-house creative services department. There, the ease and simplicity of the Mac I was provided with allowed me, completely untrained, to master the production of print advertising. Within my first week I'd mastered programmes like QuarkXpress and Illustrator, and had produced my first billboard - a poster for The Simpsons, which was about to launch on Sky One. Six weeks later, I saw the finished poster for real on a 96-sheet billboard on the A3 in New Malden.

Near Sky's offices in Osterley was an Apple reseller. Occasionally I'd go past it and, like Mike Myers in Wayne's World eyeing up that white Fender Stratocaster, would press my nose up against the glass window, drooling over an Apple PowerBook. Clever product placement of these laptops in various films had made them extremely desirable, which also made the one I kept drooling over completely out of range of anything I could afford. And, to be frank, there wouldn't have been much justification for me owning it. But it did look effortlessly cool.

Apple ownership arrived, eventually, 20 years ago, on May 6, 1998 when, under the leadership of the late Steve Jobs, the company unveiled the product that would, finally, satisfy my Apple infatuation, and at the same time, would set the company on the path to unprecedented riches that it enjoys today. That product was the iMac. Essentially a 15-inch portable TV with a computer built into it, that, however, wasn't the appeal, or the point. With its translucent 'Bondi Blue'-coloured casing around a 15-inch CRT tube screen, matching keyboard and mouse, it was everything the home PC user needed in one, neat unit. Even the grab handle led some eccentrics to treat it like a laptop.

The first model was somewhat rudimentary, and functional upgrades progressively followed, along with the expansion of more colour choices ('Blueberry', 'Grape', 'Tangerine', 'Lime' and 'Strawberry'). But that first iMac, however, was an instant design classic. Jobs and his team - in particular, Sir Jonny Ive - had brilliantly thrown away all the aesthetic norms of a PC - beige or grey boxes - and created something that looked good out in the open, not just hidden away in an office. Even the mouse and keyboard matched the 'fruity' colours of the computer itself. The iMac was (and, seven generations on, still is) an extremely daring move. It was also relatively affordable, too. $1,299 might not sound cheap, but that was half the price of most other Apple computers on the market. Finally, Mac ownership was within reach.

The iMac was an instant success. By January 1999 the previously struggling Apple had more than tripled its quarterly profit. Demand was, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, "insatiable". Moreover, the iMac reinvented Apple as a cool consumer electronics brand, and by introducing a machine with such popular appeal (the word "fun" had never been previously associated with computing) the naysayers who believed that Apple was just a niche brand selling to professionals were soon being proven wrong. Visit a coffee shop today - especially one within the catchment of a major university or college - and that ubiquitous, illuminated Apple logo will be glaring right at you from the lids of MacBooks. So much for niche.

I bought my first iMac in Amsterdam in 1999, a year after Apple had launched it. Now, I was not only owning my first PC, but I was also finally owning a Mac. At the beginning of 2001 I moved to Silicon Valley and bought my second iMac, a second-generation model front-loading CD slot and better connectivity. Soon I was embracing the "digital lifestyle", thanks to a USB-based 'hub' device as attractive as it was functional, colourful and, relatively speaking, powerful, too. With its convenient means of ripping and storing CDs, I now had a digital jukebox. The purchase of my first digital camera in the summer of 2001, followed by the iPod's arrival the following October (an introduction somewhat overshadowed in the US by the pallor left by 9/11 a month before) completed my conversion to the twin cults of Jobs and Apple.

It's not an exaggeration to say the iMac saved Apple. It turned a professionals-only computing business into a consumer brand. In the 20 years since that first iMac was unveiled, I've upgraded my Apple fleet in overlapping steps: the original iMac gave way to the first flat screen model, that gave way to sleeker and thinner models. The iPod gave way to larger capacity models, Nanos and then Apple's next masterstroke, the iPhone, followed by the iPad. There are parallels here to the tale of Trigger's "award-winning" broom in Only Fools And Horses - owned for 20 years, but with 17 new heads and 14 new handles. Of course, this continuing Apple fandom is partly the result of clever Apple marketing, but it shouldn't be dismissed, either, that Apple's design excellence - both inside and out of its products - has kept me on board all this time.

Apple has its justified critics (not least of which the mess it has made of iTunes - transforming what has been a brilliantly efficient music management program for the iMac into a morass of user-unfriendly layers designed to push consumers to the Apple Music platform). But much of what drew me to that first iMac, 20 years ago, continues to draw me to its products today - design, simplicity and, yes, just a little sprinkling of fairy dust.

Is Apple heading for a mid-life crisis?

I'm an MS-DOS man myself," so I was informed, 26 years ago, by Brian the IT man who'd come to fix an Apple printer in my office which, thanks to my impulsive then-boss, had universally ignored company IT policy and had Macintosh computers installed or every member of the Sky TV press office. We were regarded as freaks for having these small, squat greyish boxes with their tiny screens.

Around the same time the publishing industry was in the throes of revolution. Proper revolution. Desktop publishing was taking over, which meant that anyone working in the media was getting to play with Apple technology, either for composing copy or laying out pages.

The media world, insular beast that it is, fell in love with the Mac. But it was a lonely world to occupy. Microsoft was the king, the PC was still overwhelmingly a business tool and home computer ownership was still rare. Even when Apple ventured, properly, into the consumer technology space, first with its iMac and then the iPod, there was still a latent feeling that it was a niche brand selling expensive devices to a clique of design-conscious (some might even say design-obsessed) geeks and posers.

That, however, as we all know, was about to change. The company that began on April 1, 1976, with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne selling computer kits to hobbyists - each hand-built by Wozniak - is now the most valuable company in the world, estimated to be worth more than $700 billion with a cash pile of $218 billion. Perhaps more importantly, it's Apple's ubiquity which is the most breathtaking. At last week's Apple 'townmeeting' in Cupertino, CEO Tim Cook revealed that there are now more than one billion active Apple devices in use around the world.

Of course, this has much to do with the incredible growth spurt Apple experienced after the company - under Steve Jobs - launched that first iMac in 1997. It's unique popularising of what had been a dull, beige worktool - coupled with a sprinkling of Jobs fairy dust to talk up the-then nascent "digital lifestyle", was a stroke of genius (and, of course, designer Jony Ive deserves a lot of credit for making the iMac something you wanted to show off, rather than hide beneath a dust cover when not in use).

What followed - the iPod, iTunes, the iPod, iPhone and iPad - until Jobs' death in 2011 was, in relative terms, akin to the rapid spread of human civilisation. The iPhone and iPad, in particular, were genuine game changers (a phrase I hate, but can't ignore in this context). I probably use my iPad now more than any other technology device I own, such is its versatility and convenience. This, though, is the essence of Apple, and probably why my home is full of its hardware. Take, for example, the little Apple TV. Even though it is, to all intents and purposes, a screenless iPhone, it, too, is versatile and immensely convenient: Netflix, iTunes, YouTube and my music collection and much, much more all there in that little black hockey puck hidden beneath the TV. Or my current iMac - a machine I don't really regard as a PC but as a thin but nourishing slice of design and technology excellence.

However, not everything in my walled Apple garden is rosy. iTunes has now become a bloated mess, with Apple Music - a clunky attempt to take on streaming services like Spotify - lacking any relevance to us earlier Apple adopters who liked the triumvirate of the iMac, iTunes and an iPod to easily managed music collections. And in promoting the iPad Pro as a 'PC killer', there's every chance that it might start to cannibalise sales of its own line of MacBooks. As delightfully thin as a MacBook Air is, the 9.7-inch iPad Pro is pretty close to replacing that, too.

And then there's the Apple Watch. Really, are they being bought in quantity? Are we that in need of convenience that we can't be bothered to pick up our phone to read our e-mail or retrieve a boarding pass? With this, Apple have over-stretched themselves. Under Jobs, the company found a way of selling snow to the eskimo: computers, digital music players and mobile phones existed long before Apple applied their touch to them, but each time they managed to come up with a compelling - and often impulsive - reason for you having to own one. Not with the watch.

Apple does have some history in launching things people don't want, or don't want just yet (the Apple Newton and their 'cube' Mac computer for a start), so there's every chance that the Apple Watch may develop into a bigger business. And that is what it needs, desperately. The new iPhone SE and indeed the iPad Pro 9.7 may keep revenue ticking over as replacement sales, but there is a genuine sense that the Apple magic has plateaued.

Businesswise, there is still plenty of potential for Apple in developing markets like China and other parts of Asia, where disposable incomes are increasingly in range of Apple pricing (it still amazes me how Apple could become some dominant given that their products still command a mighty brand premium). But what is clearly lacking from Apple is a vision of its future.

We can safely assume that there will be an iPhone 7, perhaps in September or next year, followed by an iPhone 8, 9, 10 and so on. iPhones will get even thinner (probably dispensing with the headphone jack, thus forcing us all into buying new headphones...) to the extent that they will cease to feel like phones at all. Similarly, the iPad will continue to get thinner and lighter, more powerful and better suited to productivity, thus fulfilling Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller's prediction that the PC is under threat from the tablet. But in neither product lines is there any sense of true evolution, apart from design and performance improvements.

In the Mac department, Apple trundles along. MacBooks will continue to be popular with students and design types and iMacs will continue to be the choice of those who need a desktop and prefer it to be stylish (such as the White House, if House Of Cards is to be believed...). However, the Mac range accounts for less than 9% of Apple's annual revenue. Ironic, given that it represents the company's origin.

So, as it turns 40, Apple faces a mid-life crisis of sorts. Like many in their 40s, life can be good: a comfortable income and a healthy career. But as with many when they hit 40, questions start to emerge. Is this all life has to offer? Could there be more?

In converging computing and consumer electronics, Apple may have hit the motherlode - and the stratospheric financials underline this. But they are also discovering - as both traditional computing and consumer electronics manufacturers have found - that when everyone owns the 'must have' keeping the cash registers working is the biggest challenge. The consumer electronics industry, in some part, has been usurped by Apple. Bar the screen, my Apple TV box alone provides all the content that three or four separate devices used to provide. This has been the existential challenge for the CE industry now for nearly two decades, reflected in the fact that the likes of Panasonic, Hitachi, JVC, Sharp and even Sony have contracted or even disappeared completely as Samsung, with its deep (and riskily-so) pockets have taken over. Philips, my old company, has sold off much of its CE product ranges, and while innovation continues to be vibrant in, for example, its TV business, it can't be fun competing any more.

Apple long ago stopped acting as a computer company in the consumer world. In some respects, it has invented a category all of its own, somewhere in the midst of making products that serve lifestyle, entertainment and productivity needs. But that still doesn't guarantee a future. Plenty of big technology brands have fallen by the wayside as markets have matured and standalone devices that could have been milked for money have become obsolete.

We are now coming to the end of the first digital era, one that was defined by portable content, miniaturisation, and the Web. Around the corner lies the 'Internet of Things' and 'Machine-to-Machine', in which sensors and devices fragment and talk to each other autonomously. Some have predicted that the smartphone in its current guise could be obsolete by the beginning of the next decade. That's only four years away. For Apple, who's iPhone represents almost 70% of its income, that's a future that will have people within the company's shiny new spaceship HQ in Cupertino thinking very long and hard about where they want to go over the next 40 years.