It was a Tuesday evening at 19:47. Steve Jobs was in his office doing iStuff when one of the Apple lead engineers walked in. The engineer presented Jobs with the iPod prototype. Jobs twirled it around in his hands, weighed it and rejected it. It was too big for him. Having consumers lug around something that big was not something he was willing to consider (if only he could see the iPhone 13 Pro Max).

The engineer expressed that they had redefined everything Physics when they created the device and there was no way to make it smaller. Jobs picked it up, walked over to his aquarium and dropped the device in. A lot of bubbles floated up to the surface. He retorted that those bubbles meant there was space in the iPod and that space could be removed to make the device smaller.

This story is apocryphal (meaning it is a bunch of B.S.). The same has been said about the Sony C.E.O who oversaw the prototyping of the Sony Walkman. There is even a Sony ad based on this. The point though is, there is always room for improvement in technology. You can never kick back and say, we have innovated beyond innovation and there is nowhere else to go.

Often, we feel this way when we experience the development of a technology or product. When the first car fueled using exploding dinosaurs was made, humanity then would have laughed at you if you told them in less than 100 years, a man would walk on the moon. Now, with 32GB ram phones and 1TB storage and octa-core CPUs, it feels like we have nowhere else to improve on.There is always room for more innovation.

Legend has it that that iPod is still swimming with the fishes.