The iPod may be gone, but we’ll never forget how incredible Apple’s portable music player was. To mark its incredible run, the team at Lumafield has put the iPod under its Neptune scanner to show off just how remarkable and revolutionary it was–and how it evolved over the years.
Lumafield chose three models for scanning: the first-gen iPod, the sixth-gen iPod Classic, and the original iPod nano. The results are mesmerizing and show how Tony Fadell and iPod team was able to engineer the iPod for maximum space and thinness. In fact, Fadell joined Lumafield to examine the scans and reminisce about the complexity and precision that went into designing each player. As product lead Jon Bruner explains:
We chose these iPod models because they illustrated a few major milestones. The first one, of course, was a landmark in product design, but it’s also the only one with a mechanical wheel. You can see the ball bearing in the scan, and Tony talks about how hard it was to develop a mechanical wheel that wouldn’t rock side to side when it was being used. The 6th Generation iPod Classic was the mature version of that product line, with a solid-state wheel, more modern connectors, and much less empty space inside. The Nano Gen 1 predated the 6th Gen iPod Classic and represents an enormous amount of progress in miniaturization.
We’ve created a gallery of our favorite images below, but head over to Lumafield’s iPod CT Scan site to check out the full video and 360-degree scans.
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Author: Michael Simon, Executive Editor
Michael Simon has been covering Apple since the iPod was the iWalk. His obsession with technology goes back to his first PC—the IBM Thinkpad with the lift-up keyboard for swapping out the drive. He's still waiting for that to come back in style tbh.