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Was the iPod Accessory Port Inspired By a 40-Year-Old Camera?

Posted by timothy on from the danged-neat-even-if-coincidence dept.

An anonymous reader writes "While Samsung has been accused of repeatedly borrowing everything from Apple's hardware, to packaging and accessories, it appears that all current iDevices share a port which is very similar to one found on a forty-year-old Polaroid camera. It gets more interesting when you realize that camera was the 'supreme achievement' of a man Steve Jobs idolized. Edwin Land was the creator of the Polaroid camera and, if Steve Jobs obsessed over Land's devices the way many do with iPhones, etc. today, there's a chance this similarity is not a coincidence."

4 of 263 comments (clear)

  1. Those aren't the same. by YesIAmAScript · · Score: 5, Informative

    That slot on a Polaroid camera was actually an edge connector. The flash bar was printed on a PCB and had gold trace "fingers" on a protruding section, like an ISA card. These are very cheap, as only one side of the connector even is a connector at all, the other is just a PCB. But they also aren't physically very strong and aren't good for a lot of insertion/removal cycles.

    The iPod 30-pin has a metal shelled connector on both mating pieces. These are more precise, last longer and with the a latch system (present on some iPod cables, not others) physically strong. You can hang an iPod Mini easily from a latched 30-pin connector while the Polaroid flash bars fell out without even putting weight on them.

    Also note Steve Jobs didn't design Apple's 30-pin connector, Donald J Novotney did.

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    http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
    1. Re:Those aren't the same. by DeepFried · · Score: 5, Informative

      Hi, I was the one who posted. I didn't mean to imply that the port was functionally the same. Just that the two ports are micrometers apart in size. And both are situated centered on the end of the device. It struck me as an interesting coincidence. Also, my server is slashdotted. I have supercache enabled and CDN for my media. Still couldn't handle the load. Ugh. Wordpress. Maybe time to move to Tumblr.

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      Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?
    2. Re:Those aren't the same. by DeepFried · · Score: 2, Informative

      Lot's of devices need multipurpose ports. Nokia and Sony were making devices for years with multimedia out. None of them were the exact dimensions of the SX-70. That's all I was thinking. Cheers,

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      Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?
    3. Re:Those aren't the same. by wickerprints · · Score: 2, Informative

      No, you didn't "mean" to imply that the port was functionally the same, but in effect, that's exactly what people have gathered. Now we have folks claiming that Steve Jobs appropriated the design from Polaroid and so any other kind of copying by the likes of Samsung is therefore okay. Whether or not you intended a deception is irrelevant; you basically took a poorly-researched supposition and presented it as fodder for those who already made up their mind to hate Apple products.

      If you have any degree of sincerity, you would update your blog post to reflect this information. Otherwise, you are being disingenuous and your credibility is nil.