The Guts
What, then, are the pieces? What are the technical innards of the seamless iPod? What's underneath the surface a lot of people were interested in knowing what was inside the iPod when it made its debut. One of them was David Carey, who for the past three years has run a business in Austin, Tex., called Portelligent, which tears apart electronic devices and does what might be called guts checks. He tore up his first iPod in early 2002.
Inside was a neat stack of core components. First, the power source: a slim, squarish rechargeable battery made by Sony. Atop that was the hard disk -- the thing that holds all the music files. At the time, small hard disks were mostly used in laptops, or as removable data-storage cards for laptops. So-called 2.5-inch hard disks, which are protected by a casing that actually measures about 2 3/4 inches by 4 inches, were fairly commonplace, but Toshiba had come up with an even smaller one. With a protective cover measuring just over 2 inches by 3 inches, 0.2 inches thick and weighing less than two ounces, its 1.8-inch disk could hold five gigabytes of data -- or, in practical terms, about a thousand songs. This is what Apple used.