The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness

Steven Levy

Oct 2006 · Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

On October 23, 2001, Apple Computer, a company known for its chic, cutting-edge technology -- if not necessarily for its dominant market share -- launched a product with an enticing promise: You can carry an entire music collection in your pocket. It was called the iPod. What happened next exceeded the company's wildest dreams. Over 50 million people have inserted the device's distinctive white buds into their ears, and the iPod has become a global obsession. The Perfect Thing is the definitive account, from design and marketing to startling impact, of Apple's iPod, the signature device of our young century.

Besides being one of the most successful consumer products in decades, the iPod has changed our behavior and even our society. It has transformed Apple from a computer company into a consumer electronics giant. It has remolded the music business, altering not only the means of distribution but even the ways in which people enjoy and think about music. Its ubiquity and its universally acknowledged coolness have made it a symbol for the digital age itself, with commentators remarking on "the iPod generation." Now the iPod is beginning to transform the broadcast industry, too, as podcasting becomes a way to access radio and television programming. Meanwhile millions of Podheads obsess about their gizmo, reveling in the personal soundtrack it offers them, basking in the social cachet it lends them, even wondering whether the device itself has its own musical preferences.

Steven Levy, the chief technology correspondent for Newsweek magazine and a longtime Apple watcher, is the ideal writer to tell the iPod's tale. He has had access to all the key players in the iPod story, including Steve Jobs, Apple's charismatic cofounder and CEO, whom Levy has known for over twenty years. Detailing for the first time the complete story of the creation of the iPod, Levy explains why Apple succeeded brilliantly with its version of the MP3 player when other companies didn't get it right, and how Jobs was able to convince the bosses at the big record labels to license their music for Apple's groundbreaking iTunes Store. (We even learn why the iPod is white.) Besides his inside view of Apple, Levy draws on his experiences covering Napster and attending Supreme Court arguments on copyright (as well as his own travels on the iPod's click wheel) to address all of the fascinating issues -- technical, legal, social, and musical -- that the iPod raises.

Borrowing one of the definitive qualities of the iPod itself, The Perfect Thing shuffles the book format. Each chapter of this book was written to stand on its own, a deeply researched, wittily observed take on a different aspect of the iPod. The sequence of the chapters in the book has been shuffled in different copies, with only the opening and concluding sections excepted. "Shuffle" is a hallmark of the digital age -- and The Perfect Thing, via sharp, insightful reporting, is the perfect guide to the deceptively diminutive gadget embodying our era.

Ratings and reviews

Steve Levy's latest book is yet another example supporting my thesis the English majors/journalists are no longer capable of explaining the complex world we live in. The Perfect Thing is a love paean to the ipod, about how cool it is, how nice one is to use. In imitation of the ipod's shuffle function, Levy even has different copies of the book with the chapters out of order, so each person would read the chapters in a different order. The cute little device works, but that's all it is, cute. I read the book hoping for an insight about the design and the development of the ipod. Levy has proved himself in the past capable of understanding the people dynamics of software, but in this case he was so caught up with love for the ipod, that he skimmed over the development process in 1 short chapter that was mostly about how good Apple was at UI design. From anyone else, I might understand an excuse saying that he was not given sufficient access, but Levy makes a point of bragging about how many meetings he had with Steve Jobs. And of course, any question of journalistic integrity was long gone when he bragged about being one of the first recipients of the first review products from Apple (presumably he gets all his ipods for free for writing such positive articles about Apple, the ipod, and Steve Jobs). The last straw for this book came when he spent an entire chapter on the shuffle feature, on how it wasn't really random for him, but his personal ipod liked Steely Dan anyway. Anyone with even a slight understanding of probability theory should be insulted by this chapter. All in all, the 3 hours spent reading this book is time wasted. This book does not deserve shelf-space in any thinking person's home, not even if you're a fan of the ipod.

this is a good book

2nd q12

About the author

Steven Levy is editor at large at Wired magazine. The Washington Post has called him “America’s premier technology journalist.” His was previously founder of Backchannel and chief technology writer and senior editor for Newsweek. Levy has written seven previous books and his work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper’s Magazine, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Premiere. Levy has also won several awards during his thirty-plus years of writing about technology and is the author of several previous books including Facebook: The Inside Story; Insanely Great; The Perfect Thing; and In the Plex. He lives in New York City.