Alex Watson
Why the 30-pin iPod Dock connector tells you almost everything you need to know about Apple – a company that has its eye on the long term.
I did warn Nik, MacUser’s editor, before I started writing this column. ‘It might get quite geeky,’ I said. ‘That’s the point,’ he replied. ‘Go for it.’
Perhaps I should have told him that I once had an enjoyable conversation with a couple of friends as to which countries have the best plugs. It’s one of the few times I’ve been patriotic in an argument, as the UK plug is a thing of genius – heavyweight, solid, incapable of wobbling in the socket – compared to the fiddly, weak two-pin designs seen in the US and elsewhere (there is, of course, a comprehensive Wikipedia page on this, here: bit.ly/96CKl8).
The point is, you can’t say there hasn’t been fair warning. This issue, I want to talk about ports and jacks: yes, that’s right, the holes you plug your headphones into, or the way you connect your iPhone to your computer.
There’s more going on here than you might think. For starters, consider the 30-pin iPod Dock connector. While Apple might have changed how it connects to the computer (dropping FireWire in favour of USB), the end that connects to the iPod has remained remarkably constant since its introduction in 2003. Since then, it’s been present on the vast majority of iPods, and has now been carried on to iPhones and the iPad.
This is remarkable when you consider how radically different today’s iPod is to that of 2003, and the fact the iPhone and iPad were only megalomaniacal twinkles in Steve Jobs’ eyes. The fact Apple has been able to keep the same connector is emblematic of the strongest characteristics of the company since the return of Jobs in 1997: first, a sense of history; second, a savvy commercialism; third, an obsession with detailed hardware engineering; and, finally, a ruthless strategic imperative.
By history, I mean that Jobs has encouraged Apple to think of itself as one of the 20th century’s few meaningful companies – and so it doesn’t look at much of the immediate IT market for competition, much less inspiration. When Jobs or another senior Apple employee mentions another company, it tends to be a firm such as Braun, Porsche or Leica, which have all produced iconic designs.
Placing Apple alongside these classic firms obviously does the brand good, but it also filters down to the designers inside Cupertino in terms of thinking about aims and objectives. It’s no coincidence that the longevity of the iPod connector is comparable to the way camera manufacturers such as Leica and Nikon have kept the same basic mount design for their lenses for 50 years.
There’s sound commercial reasoning behind this approach: customers don’t just buy one-off products, they tend to buy into the system, investing piece by piece, year by year. Consumers perceive this as being good value for money, but for the company, it also means the cost of defection is high. It’s very rare for a photographer to switch from Nikon to Canon – replacing all those lenses and accessories would be very costly, so the rival camera would have to be not just a few percentage points better, but overwhelmingly superior, which is unlikely. It also means that the camera manufacturer doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel every time it releases a new camera body, because lens designs can stay in service for a long time.
The longevity of the 30-pin iPod connector works in just the same way – I still have the AC adaptor and cable from my original hard disk iPod and can use it to charge my iPhone. iPod owners are notorious for their high spending on accessories, and I think this is in part due to the stability of the connector. This in turn spurs more third parties to make accessories, which makes the iPod a more attractive buy for consumers.
Opting for its own 30-pin design instead of a standard USB connection also points to the fact Apple is a hardware design company at heart. It likes to go its own way, but in not always accepting off-the-shelf technology, it often gets closer to greatness. Its willingness to re-engineer components and challenge received wisdom in pursuit of a greater goal was most obviously evident with the design of the iPhone 4′s antenna: mounting it on the outside of the phone allowed for a much bigger battery while keeping the phone slim. Of course, the iPhone 4 is also indicative of the trouble Apple’s approach can create – sometimes accepted wisdom is accepted for a good reason.
Apple’s sluggish adoption of industry-standard connections is frustrating for consumers, too: it took ages for Macs to gain SD card slots and HDMI ports, and it’s surely only rapacity that stops the iPad having a USB slot for connecting cameras.
There’s no sign the debate over the iPhone 4 antenna is going to cause Apple to start taking more off-the-shelf designs. If anything, the company is more and more willing to get down and dirty with the hardware it produces, and here I can address the fourth and final characteristic visible in the design of the Dock connector: strategic focus.
The Dock connector was designed with future products in mind, products that did more than just play digital audio files. That’s been the impulse behind iTunes, too. It’s a well-known story that the music labels agreed to allow iTunes to sell songs on their own because the software was only available for Macs, and only synced with pricey iPods. Fast forward a few months, and iTunes jumped to the PC, while the iPod mini and shuffle ensured that everyone could afford an iPod.
Apple’s approach since Jobs returned has been to start small, and then to expand and improve. The launch of every new Apple product is greeted with complaints about what it can’t do – from copy and paste to multi-tasking – but it does enough and with a huge amount of panache to become successful, allowing Apple extra time and resources to improve it later. This constant cycle of improvement again means customers are more tied in, and more motivated to remain with the platform.
Offering improvements with software updates is one thing, but Apple is keen for people to upgrade their hardware, so that means a rigorous focus on new products – branding its own CPU, even if for the time being it’s heavily based on an off-the-shelf design, is a smart move, as are tweaks such as the MagSafe power connector. The patents must have it tied down effectively, as we’ve yet to see other laptop manufacturers following suit. Scan the files of the US Patent Office and there are plenty of other ideas in there from Apple for small, incremental improvements to its hardware.
Having an argument about plugs might be a little on the sad side, but just as DNA reveals much about us, tiny pieces of design reveal a lot about a company’s approach.
