Steve Jobs reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a small white box. He had just spent 20 minutes demonstrating Mac applications, and the crowd was waiting. That was the first iPod, shown on October 23, 2001, and Jobs made a bold claim for it: about the size of a deck of playing cards, it held around 1,000 songs.
Twenty-five years on, it is easy to forget how doubtful the moment felt. The Western world was still reeling from the attacks on the World Trade Center, and economic uncertainty was growing. Apple wanted US$399 for an MP3 player that worked only with Macs, which held less than 3% of the computer market. MacRumors, which collected reader comments at the time, recalled people questioning the price, the Mac-only limit and the device’s significance. One reader called it “far from revolutionary.”
Why it worked
MP3 players had existed since 1997, and Apple judged them either too big and clumsy or too small to hold a useful library, with menus that were miserable to use. Apple’s answer paired a hard drive from Toshiba, which hardware chief Jon Rubinstein had found on a visit to a supplier in Japan, with a monochrome screen and a wheel with a button at its center. Listeners could browse by artist, playlist or single song. Tony Fadell, whom Rubinstein recruited to lead the project, code-named P-68, ran much of the build while most of Apple’s engineers were busy with the iMac.
Software did half the work. iTunes let people import CDs into a digital library on a Mac, part of Jobs’s plan to make the computer the “digital hub” for music, photos and video. A FireWire cable moved songs and charged the battery, and Apple said a whole CD could transfer in under 10 seconds. The press had been invited weeks earlier to see a “breakthrough digital device” that was not a Mac, and guesses ranged from a home stereo accessory to a handheld with handwriting recognition.
The iPod went on sale November 10, 2001. Readers reported lining up. Early forum posts praised it, but also grumbled about sound quality, how hot it ran while charging, and fingerprints on the polished back.
A fast-moving family
The second generation in 2002 swapped the turning wheel for a touch-sensitive circle and added Windows support, which widened the audience sharply. The third generation brought the 30-pin connector in 2003. The iPod mini arrived in January 2004 with the Click Wheel, which folded the playback buttons into the scrolling surface. In 2005 came the display-free shuffle and the flash-based nano, and the iPod touch followed in September 2007 with a Multi-Touch screen and Wi-Fi. Apple had sold 100 million iPods by April 2007, under six years after the first reached customers, and more than 304 million by 2011.
From albums to single songs
Two years after launch, Apple opened the iTunes Music Store, selling individual songs for 99 cents. Buyers who wanted two or three tracks no longer had to pay for an album or an expensive single, and single-song sales soared. Some artists objected. Jay-Z refused in 2007 to put his album American Gangster on iTunes, arguing that films are not sold as separate scenes. That dispute faded once subscription services offered tens of millions of songs for a monthly fee, and Apple had to buy Beats to keep pace with Spotify.
Fadell told Wired recently that the iPhone, and the Apple the world knows, would not exist without the iPod. The iPhone’s arrival in 2007 started the long decline. Apple dropped the iPod classic in 2014, the nano and shuffle in July 2017 and, on May 10, 2022, the iPod touch, ending a line that had sold an estimated 450 million units over more than 20 years.
Sources
- Twenty five years of iPod: How 1,000 songs in your pocket changed an industry
- IPod
- Happy 25th Anniversary, iPod
Photo: Stahlkocher (CC BY-SA 3.0)
