IWOZ: Computer Geek to Cult Icon
by Steve Wozniak with Gina Smith
Headline, £20, 320pp

EVERY GENERATION HAS its distinctive machine and ours is the iPod. The President of the United States has one and a 2004 New York Times article entiteld “What is on George Bush’s iPod?” excited waves of pop psychological analysis about how playlists reveal character.

George W. likes Nirvana. Tony Blair has one too, although the Prime Minister of the country that developed modern computing does not know how to work it.

Karl Lagerfeld, who runs Chanel in Paris, has 60. The back of each is laser-etched with a code cataloguing its contents. I have one in a drawer because I do not much care for music. But that’s another story — I bought it anyway.

There have been precedents in portable music. In 1954 a now forgotten US company called Regency introduced the first pocket-sized transistor radio. The next year Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Kabushiki Kaika, now better known as Sony, launched its own tranny and music was released from the drawing room and car into the community. Twenty-five years later, I was on an aircraft to New York with Patrick Uden, then producer of Tomorrow’s World. He passed around the cabin a prototype of the Sony Walkman.

The Walkman created a psychology of isolation appropriate to the Me Decade, but the iPod, launched in October 2001, added another dimension to solipsism. With its distinctive ear buds (in mugger’s white), you created a personal environment protective ag-ainst the horrors of commuting, but the download technology turned commuters from passive consumers into active editors: five years later, open access and shareware define culture. With 5,000 songs shuffling through your brain, the old hierarchies are defunct. I have Gluck next to Buffalo Springfield: the iPod does not simply change the way we listen to music, it changes the way we think.

Like Teflon and the internet, we have the US military industrial complex to thank for the iPod’s technologies. It is all about electrochemistry, microdrive storage and signal compression. But the design helped to make the phenomenon: the clunky old Digital Equipment Corporation had a “Personal Jukebox” on the market in 1998 but, as it looked like a car battery, Karl Lagerfeld did not buy 60.

The story of how Apple Computer, of Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California, came to be the dominant force in music is the subject of these two fascinating but flawed books: Steven Levy’s The Perfect Thing and Steve Wozniak’s iWoz. It is one of the great stories of the day.

Wozniak was born in 1950 into the California aerospace aristocracy; his hard-drinking father was an engineer at Lockheed’s secret desert R&D facility. He grew up when Sunnyvale grocery stores had self-service oscilloscope testers. An ur-nerd, he confesses: “I loved my transmitter and receiver.”

A shared interest in “phone-phreaking” brought him together with his younger, more entrepreneurial partner, Steve Jobs. This relationship was secured when they successfully generated a 2600-hertz tone whose purpose was to defraud AT&T. By 1976 they had sold 150 computers at $100 each, their name taken, hippy-dippy fashion, from a local orchard. Under Jobs, Apple developed an attractively contrarian corporate philosophy, nicely mixing advanced consumerism with cracker- barrel Zen.

Wozniak left in 1985 to concentrate on remote controls. In the early 1990s, a young English product-designer named Jonathan Ive (born 1967) joined the team. At the time Jobs had been consigned to the wilderness by men in suits but in 1997 he was back and in Ive found a soulmate even more epochal than the Wizard of Woz. Out went the suits, in came creativity.

Ive’s kandy-kolored streamlined casings signalled important new internal technologies, but the iPod was his masterpiece — 6.4oz (181g) of high density data storage cased in gorgeous, sleek white polycarbonate and stainless steel, the iPod is so tactile that Jobs says you want to lick it. There are no screwheads, no doors, no ugly buttons. Ive’s method was to refine, refine and refine some more; his aim to achieve ultimate simplicity.

“I think,” he modestly said, “our goal was about getting design out of the way.” As they say in Zen, whatever is true, the opposite is truer. The iPod is the ultimate designed object, named by Levy “the Perfect Thing” (in reference to Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm): an “uncanny alignment of technology, design, culture and media”.

Levy’s book is what you would expect of a Newsweek journalist “on the technology beat” — interesting, sharp, breathless and padded, full of I-was-there observations: “It was 6.17 and Steve Jobs entered a silent auditorium, looked at me and said ‘Where’s the men’s room?’ ” Wozniak’s book, co-written with Gina Smith in a tradition that goes back to Samuel Crowther’s version of Henry Ford’s My Life and Times, is full of detail and charm (Woz loves phone numbers), but lacks insight, especially into Jobs, the Mephistopheles of the story.

It was Jobs’s decision to credit Ive, a brilliant promotional device that has worked even better than the distinctive “silhouette” adverts. Jobs and Ive made iPod and iPod made music 60 per cent of Apple’s business.

Ive says: “I don’t see it as art . . . I see it as a digital music player.” Still, I long to know what is on his and Woz’s and Jobs’s playlists.

What’s on their iPods?
We asked four writers to compile playlists to fit their books. Here are some highlights.

Gautam Malkani’s LONDONSTANI playlist

Cathi Unsworth’s THE NOT KNOWING playlist

The Not Knowing is published by Serpent’s Tail

Maggie O’Farrell’s THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX playlist

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is published by Headine Review

Don Paterson’s ORPHEUS playlist

Orpheus is published by Faber

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