Wired covers Ledger’s launch of Stax, a brand new hardware wallet designed by the creator of the iPod, iPhone, and Nest Thermostat —

Read the full announcement here.

Fadell [iPod, iPhone, Nest Thermostat creator] met with Gauthier [Ledger CEO] at a Paris café, and they agreed that Ledger needed its next product to have broader appeal. They parted ways, but Fadell kept brainstorming. When he hit on a vision, he met with Gauthier again. “I want to be the chief designer on that,” Fadell told him. Gauthier immediately agreed. 

FADELL STARTED THE gig full of ideas. As the guy who swept away the pain points of first-generation MP3 players (big and clunky, engineering degree required to select a song) and thermostats (ugly, no connectivity, impossible to program), Fadell was quick to understand the shortcomings of Ledger’s wallet. Its screen was tiny, it lacked a keyboard or keypad, and its appearance and charm were on par with an early-2000s USB stick. The startup instructions warned users to set aside a minimum of 30 minutes. 

In his mind, the wallet should be about the size of a credit card and have a touchscreen. The setup time should take no more than three minutes. You should be able to personalize the lock screen to display anything you want. He also envisioned people owning several wallets, one for each category of digital collecting or banking. He liked the concept of stacking them on top of each other, like a cash bundle of $100 bills. He came up with the idea of having magnets to snap the units into a tidy stack. That feature provided the name for the device: Stax.