Pasteboard is where I’m going to keep the unfinished things. Every designer has a clipboard full of them — projects that got far enough to be interesting and not far enough to be real, then quietly aged out of the active file. Rather than let them rot, I want to pull a few out and dissect them honestly: what the idea was, what actually works, and — more usefully — what I never managed to solve. First up: an iPod Pro that Apple will never make, because I made it.
The premise
It’s a what-if. The iPod is gone; it did its job so well that the iPhone ate it. But the kind of person the iPod was for — someone who takes music seriously enough to want a dedicated object for it — never went away. So: what would a “Pro” iPod be, now, in the age of streaming and pocket recording?
The pitch, borrowed almost word for word from 2001: “1,000 songs in your pocket” becomes “infinite songs in your pocket.”
The hardware idea
The one decision I’m still happy with is the controls. The click wheel was iconic, but it was a solution to a 2001 problem — scrolling a long list with no touchscreen. A modern iPod has a touchscreen, so the wheel would be nostalgia, not function. Instead I gave it a row of real, physical transport keys: play, stop, record, and a menu/grid button, laid out like the deck on a four-track or a field recorder. Tactile, eyes-free, and they map to a metaphor people already understand — you don’t scrub a progress bar, you press stop.
Silver, with a stripped-down iOS — Music, Podcasts, Radio, Apple TV — a persistent mini-player, and a deliberately skeuomorphic cassette for now-playing.
It’s a small object — about 4.1 × 2.4 × 0.62 inches — running a pared-back iOS: just the things a music person needs, a persistent mini-player, and now-playing screens that lean unapologetically skeuomorphic. The cassette isn’t ironic. It’s the same instinct as the transport buttons: make a digital, infinite library feel like a finite, physical thing you can hold a side of.
The part that makes it “Pro”
Here’s the move I’m proudest of and least sure about: the record button is real. The iPod Pro isn’t only a player — it’s a pocket field recorder. The red key captures audio, and there’s a whole recording side to the OS, with takes and projects.
Midnight. The landscape view is the field recorder — “Untitled 21, Field Recording Project” — which is the entire argument for the word “Pro.”
That’s the thesis in one feature. “Pro” doesn’t mean a bigger screen or a faster chip; it means the device produces, not just consumes. A musician sampling a sound on the street, a journalist grabbing tape, a podcaster recording on the move — that’s who the transport keys were really for. The play/stop/record cluster stops being a music skin and starts being a tool.
What I never solved
This is the honest part, and the reason it’s on the pasteboard instead of in a portfolio.
The orientation is unresolved. I drew it both ways — portrait with the keys along the bottom, landscape with them down the side — and never decided which one it is. A great object has a canonical way to be held. This one is having it both ways, which usually means I hadn’t committed.
The “why record” question has a good answer and a weak follow-through. Field recording justifies the whole concept, but I never designed the unglamorous middle: where do the files go, how do you get them off, what does Apple’s recording app actually look like at depth. It’s easy to draw the hero recording screen. The product is in the export flow I skipped.
And the hardest one: does this need to exist? The honest answer is that an iPhone with a good app does most of this. The case for a separate object is emotional — focus, tactility, a thing that only does this — and I never proved it was more than my own nostalgia talking.
None of that makes it a bad idea. It makes it an unfinished one. The controls are right, the recorder is a genuinely good reason for the thing to exist, and the questions above are the exact three I’d pick it back up to answer. Which is what the pasteboard is for: not finished work, but work worth finishing.