The Engineer Behind My Favorite Gadget

    A few weeks before I got laid off at EE Times in 2019, I had an idea for a feature story that turned out to be one of the most fun of all the articles I ever wrote there. Here’s a shortened version of it:

Rummaging through my desk drawer of retired gadgets recently, I came across my SanDisk Sansa Clip. It was my favorite product from a golden age of digital consumer electronics, and it got this passionate music fan through a rough transition from physical CDs on my bookshelf to intangible files on the internet.

A fraction of the size and weight of the Sony Walkman I loved in my college years, the Sansa Clip held an astonishingly large library of music. I could fasten it like a stumpy black clothespin to my t-shirt or shorts, plug in my headphones and take it out for a jog or bike ride, the times I most love listening to music.

As memories flooded back, I decided to seek out and thank the engineer who led the design team. Without too much trouble, I found Bill Thanos who not only led the Sansa Clip team but also worked on the Flip video handset, the Plastic Logic e-reader and the GoPro Hero camera. We talked for an hour about a bygone era of experiments in portable electronics that withered in the shadow of the Apple iPhone.

“The Clip was the product I was most proud of. It was clear it had some staying power — after I moved on to another job, I kept using it,” said Thanos, who in 2019 was the director of engineering at security specialist Symantec.

The Clip came out in October 2007, just months before the iPhone. It cost just $49, a fraction of the $249 price tag of an Apple iPod and about half the price of the low-end Apple Shuffle.

“We had a good thing going for a while, but SanDisk [a vendor of flash memory chips] pulled the plug on [the consumer systems group] because the trend was to put all the music in your iPhone…Apple subsumed lots of products into the iPhone,” he said.

“I graduated this year to an Apple Watch Series 4 and Bluetooth earplugs, and it’s even better because you don’t have a headphone cable slapping you on the back,” he said.

“The thing that’s sad is I have lots of beautiful watches I got as gifts, but they don’t track my steps and heart rate. Once again, Apple has replaced separate gadgets we use and wear. I love Apple products. I never worked for them, but I have some resentment from time to time for needing to change jobs because of them,” he said with a laugh.

A few years earlier, the Flip video handset had a similar fate. It was “the only game in town for standard-definition video” in a pocket-sized device, but smartphone makers such as “Apple figured out how to squeeze video into the iPhone, too.”

After he left SanDisk, Thanos headed up hardware engineering at startup Plastic Logic that aimed to sell an e-reader based on a proprietary e-ink display. It floundered in part due to troubles with the display, and in part because e-readers became an app for tablets like the iPad.

Today, “there is no money for [consumer] hardware startups. It’s all software. Investors want the next Google that can scale up on a small investment. Amazon, Apple, and Google have the big pockets and software ecosystems to give hardware value,” Thanos said.

Despite the changing times, Thanos remains at heart an optimist and looks back fondly on his days in consumer electronics. “Innovation in R&D comes when you are having fun…the more fun you are having the better product you will make,” he said.

 

Making an MP3 Player Sing

In its day, the Sansa Clip was a big win for the 25-person team behind it. They packed the electronics of an MP3 player into the equivalent of a big matchbox and loaded it up with a rich set of pretty robust digital audio services given online music was still in its infancy at that time.

The tiny board was jam-packed. The Clip was basically a vehicle to sell the company’s flash memories. SanDisk could cram 16 of its chips on one side of a board the size of an SD Card. On the flip side, the team put its $4 ASIC that ran the gadget.

In one meeting, Thanos (below) suggested calling it the Clip as a reference to music clips, and the name stuck. “People said you should be in marketing,” he recalled with a laugh. 

For software, the team partnered with Audible, Rhapsody and Microsoft, integrating code for their digital rights management schemes.

As a Clip user, I struggled to find the music I loved on Rhapsody. Much of it wasn’t there because many artists weren’t accepting the pennies-on-the-dollar digital services pay. But I discovered some new artists and amassed a significant library, one I unfortunately had to leave behind when I eventually transitioned to an iPhone and its ecosystem.

Overall, “I was there three years and had fun — you could listen to music as part of your job,” Thanos said.

His boss at the time, Kevin Conley, looked back fondly, too.

“What was cool is a lot of companies were making digital music players, but because we were a flash company we took a memory-centric approach putting many, many more songs in people’s hands. That’s where the idea of the Clip came from,” Conley said.

“I reached out to Bill because these were a whole-experience product, and we needed someone capable and systems-oriented…Bill’s an incredibly creative guy,” he said.

“The mechanical team had the idea of a clip and the form factor centered around it. We also liked making the UI as simple as possible while supporting as many features as possible,” he said, recalling time he spent with Real Networks and Napster, the bleeding edge service providers of the day.

The Clip was a big success for SanDisk. “At its height, we were selling more units than the Apple Shuffle, more than Creative Labs,” another early leader in digital audio, he said, calling the Clip “the best experience of his career.”

 

A ‘Top Ten’ Gadget

In 2010, the year after he left SanDisk, the Clip still appeared in a review of the top ten MP3 devices. “It was heartwarming to see,” Conley said.

Thanos got his early experience in a consumer startup with Pure Digital which initially made a disposable point-and-shot camera. It competed with popular reusable models that Kodak and other film giants sold.

“I came in to build their camera hardware team…well before high-def days. The video was OK but not great,” he said.

The idea was a retail shop would give users a DVD of their content in return for cash and the camera which they recycled. But “people would keep the camera because it was fun to use — that’s when the idea of a camera with a retractable USB arm came up,” he said. 

The resulting Flip Video camera was, briefly, a consumer phenomenon in the early days of Web video. Cisco scooped it up for $590 million in 2009, but once smartphones supported video the network giant just as quickly canned the product in 2011.

Having experience building a hot consumer camera netted Thanos a job at GoPro where he led the team that designed the SoC for the Hero 6 and 7. The cameras embodied a concept he had already tinkered with.

“In the early days of the Flip, I duck-taped one to the handlebars of my son’s small mountain bike, we pushed it off a cliff and watched it go — we got a big kick seeing it crash,” he recalled.

Looking back at his experiences with consumer-electronics startups, “I have a lot of warm feelings thinking of those days. They remind me of my early days working on hard disk drives where there was, maybe, a hundred storage startups in the Valley at one point, but it all boiled down to two companies today,” he said.

Once a year, his colleagues at the former hard disk maker Quantum take a bike ride and reminisce about “the Wild West of storage,” he added.

Today at Symantec Thanos is “a hardware guy running a software team.” In a security company, “you are doing something good, protecting people from hackers — and it’s fun to see the hacks we are blocking, how people try to hack devices to work on bitcoin or to put malware in device. I’m still having fun,” he said.

Engineering is in Bill Thanos’ genes. “My Dad just retired this year at 84,” Thanos said.

Over his career, the elder Thanos had a small hand in work that went to the moon on the Apollo program. “My grandfather on my Mom’s side worked for GE, so I guess it was inevitable I would be an engineer,” he said.

I met a lot of engineers writing for EE Times, but perhaps none that had – and gave me – as much fun as Bill Thanos.

Coming soon: How the Internet Disrupted EE Times, and so much more