Iconic Apple iPods Get CT Scanned by Tony Fadell-Backed Startup

Image: Lumafield

Lumafield, a company that develops hardware and software to construct detailed 3D models of the internals of an object using CT (computed tomography) scanning technology, recently shared images and animations of what Apple’s most iconic iPods look like on the inside (via Fast Company).

How fitting is it, then, that one of Lumafield’s investors is none other than Tony Fadell, the “father of the iPod.”

The iPod was featured on Lumafield’s Scan of the Month series for the month of May after Apple officially discontinued the portable music player earlier this month following more than 20 years in production.

The original iPod came out on October 23, 2001, and would go on to change the way the world listened to music on the move.

Image: Lumafield

For Fadell, the scans brought back fond memories of all the engineering and design challenges the iPod posed for him and his team.

The former Apple exec said the iPod’s development could definitely have benefitted from something like Lumafield’s Neptune CT scanner and Voyager 3D reconstruction software, which would have allowed the team to look inside devices and diagnose problems without opening them up.

That is why Fadell, through his investment firm Future Shape, is backing Lumafield in the first place. “We never had an X-ray machine,” he said.

“As soon as I saw [the scanner], I said, ‘How fast can I write a check?'” he told Fast Company. “Because at the end of the day, visualizing and getting into the details of things made of atoms is very difficult, especially when you have to disassemble them and reassemble them every time.”

Lumafield didn’t stop at the original iPod, though. The company (literally) dove into the 1st-generation iPod Nano and iPod Classic as well.

Image: Lumafield

Apple eventually sprung for a CT scanner when it was time to start designing the first iPhone, Fadell said.

Fadell also noted that much of what Apple learned from creating the iPod was directly applied to the development of the iPhone, so much so that the last iPod to be produced by Apple, the iPod touch, had more in common with an iPhone than it did with an MP3 player.

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