Who makes all the parts (and the whole widget ) does matter in relation to all the talk of iPod's pricing supposedly being too high and all that. Ive's team did make iPod pretty, and Apple did write some of iPod's software, but most of the engineering work is outsourced. There's a great article on the development process
here.
And of course, the software glue that holds it all together was a purchased product too, Soundjam.
All this is
good stuff. It would have taken years for the company to put all that together from scratch, so they farmed out the ugly parts and spent the in-house time smoothing over the rough edges in software. Those little details -- making sure that the computer hooked into the unit automagically and did the right thing, removing features useless to most people and adding some useful little applications (okay, breakout isn't very useful, but at least it's cute), even thoughtful packaging -- are what resulted in a product that most people can figure out how to use by themselves.
There are less expensive machines on the market with similar capacity, but if one looks a little more closely, features are missing. They toss in an extra codec or two but leave out cool things like IEEE 1394 or the bus connector, so they don't have the same expandability options. And invariably, the jukebox software they offer (if any) is teh suck.
That's really the big difference between any Apple product and its competition. Lots of companies can make hardware, most of them don't bother to make sure people will have all the extra little bits that make them usable.
