Years before an all-screen iPhone, Apple imagined an edge-to-edge iPod nano

Introduced in 2005, the iPod nano saw different iterations throughout its life cycle. Now, one of the executives responsible for creating this iPod is showing some of the various mockups created to explore the possibilities of this product since he’s launching a new book called Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making.

Former Apple senior vice president of the iPod division Tony Fadell posted an image on his Twitter of six different iPod nano mock-ups. As he explained, they were just 3D printed dummies, “something to hold in your hand, but they’re what made the project real.”

The first mock-up for example was almost the design of the fourth-generation iPod nano released in 2008, while some of the others look similar to what the first-gen product looked like.

“What if the screen was this big? What if the wheel was that big? What if there was no wheel?”

One of the mock-ups, for example, is an all-screen iPod nano. Although one could say that this is the lost notch-less iPhone, it’s interesting to see Apple experimenting with this design, even though it was just a dummy model.

The story behind the creation of the iPod nano is in a chapter of Fadell’s new book. In the chapter titled “Make the Intangible Tangible,” the former Apple exec said that making the intangible tangible is “one of the most important parts of product development – even if you’re not building hardware.”

Related:

• The final years of Jony Ive at Apple: relationship with Tim Cook, Apple Watch vision, and burnout to come