I happen to design stuff for a living. Personally, I don’t think the Ipod is all that complex, and it was just kind of a natural extension of where technology was going at the time. Still, it’s a very good product, very creative in the way it is designed, and a very good design. A lot of credit needs to go to the marketing folks behind it as well.
Anyway, in any complex design, you first have to figure out what it is you are building. This is typically the job of marketing and/or management. Once you figure out what you are doing, a team is assembled. Usually there is a technical leader, a “guru” of sorts. It doesn’t have to be a super genius, but it does have to be someone with a lot of experience. I’m typically the lead engineer in projects I work on, and I certainly don’t consider myself to be a super genius.
Something like an Ipod has three main challenges. You’ve got an electrical circuit to design, you’ve got software to make it work, and you’ve got to mechanically package it into something small and neat looking. Your project may have a hardware lead, a software lead, and a mechanical lead, or one person may do more than one of those jobs, or even all three. There may be a non-technical project manager running the project, whose job is to track schedules and make sure the engineers and workers get the materials they need when they need them.
Let’s start with the electrical design. You’ve got to basically have a little miniature computer that can interface to stuff and play music, so it’s basically a miniature little computer with interfaces and an audio port. That’s easy enough to design. That’s not so easy to design in a teeny tiny little package, that has to be low power as well so it doesn’t suck batteries like there’s no tomorrow. But, this is what EE’s do for a living. In the old days, this was a long difficult process involving drawing out schematics, laying out boards by hand. etc. Now a lot of the grunt work is done by computer. You enter a schematic into a design package like Protel (what I use, there are others), then you make a circuit board in the design package, place the parts, route the critical signals yourself, and let the computer route the rest. Then you go back and look to see where the computer mucked up, re-route those signals, and you are done. You can even simulate how the circuit will work ahead of time to check for bugs, but you still need to build a prototype and test it. You fix any hardware bugs in the prototype, then make a final version which goes into production.
At the same time, you have software development going on. Since this is a miniature computer, it needs a miniature operating system. You can make your own, which is very time consuming, or you can buy one from someone. Apple makes their own operating system for their computers, so they may be able to use a stripped down version of it. For us other folks, there are tons of embedded operating systems available, including tiny versions of linux that we can get for free. Once you have an OS, you can start writing software to run on it. You need a user interface that controls all of the buttons and displays, and you need interfaces to the various computer ports, and of course you need something that can take MP3 data and convert it into sound.
The hardware design is also mostly done by computer these days. You need some sort of modelling package like AutoCad. There are a lot of ways the resulting pieces can be made. You can spit out drawings and send them to a machine shop for a prototype, which may be then used to make plastic molds. There are machining tools that can take the output of AutoCad or similar programs and can turn them directly into the parts you want, without needing a human in between except to operate the machine.
Once you’ve got your design done, and all the parts fit together and actually work, then you go into production. Hopefully you’ve done your design well so that it is easy to produce. An assembly line is set up. Many parts may be farmed out to other companies to produce for you, especially the circuit boards and the plastic shell, since these can be mass produced in china a lot cheaper than they can be made in the US.
For something like an Ipod, you are going to need a handful of people. You probably only need one circuit designer. There’s only one board, and more than one person is just going to get in the way. The packaging/mechanical stuff could probably all be done by one person as well. The software could be broken down into a few people. You could have one person concentrating on getting the OS running, another on the user interface, a third on the digital interfaces, and a fourth on the MP3/audio interface. It would probably take them six to eight months to make the first functional prototype, and the final released version would come out maybe six months after that. There’s also probably someone from quality control who has to look over things, someone from manufacturing who is going to set up the line, someone to write the documentation, and a group that tests the device. Someone like a project manager has to be watching over schedules and money. So, there’s a fair number of people involved besides just the engineering staff.