The start of Apple’s turnaround has been pegged to loads of dates: when Steve Jobs returned to the corporate as a part of its acquisition of NeXT in 1997, the debut of the unique iMac in 1998, even the discharge of Mac OS X in 2001. However when you’re on the lookout for the date that Apple really charted its course for the market-dominating place it finds itself in immediately, you’ll must go to October 23, 2001, on the calendar—or precisely 20 years in the past.
That was the day that Apple took the wraps off a most surprising product, however one that may go on to vary all the things for the corporate: the unique iPod.
It’s in regards to the music
I bear in mind vividly the place I used to be on the time of the unique iPod’s announcement. Roughly two months into my senior 12 months of faculty, I used to be sitting in Uris Library’s “Fish Bowl”, in entrance of my PowerBook G3, poring over all the main points of this unusual new brick on Apple’s webpage and numerous information websites. (There have been no occasion livestreams in these days, nor even social media on which to get your sizzling takes—like this well-aged classic.)
A music participant appeared like a wierd transfer for Apple, an organization which, till that time, had been centered on the non-public pc as its predominant {hardware} product. It was the heyday of the MP3, traded illicitly over the web by way of a succession of apps like Napster, LimeWire, and Kazaa. Two extra years would go by earlier than the iTunes Retailer ushered in an period of legit digital music purchases; on the time, the overwhelming majority of music in individuals’s collections had been both ripped from CDs or pirated (and typically each).
Apple
Many of the MP3 gamers that pre-dated the iPod trusted reminiscence playing cards that would maintain, at finest, a handful of songs. A few years earlier than the iPod’s launch, I needed to recurrently park my automotive throughout campus from my dorm, and I’d borrow my roommate’s Diamond Rio with 32MB of storage—simply sufficient music to accompany my mile and a half stroll.
However the iPod may, famously, maintain a thousand songs on its 5GB laborious drive. Whereas there have been different digital music gamers utilizing laborious drives on the time, what ended up setting the iPod aside had been its intuitive wheel interface and Apple’s trademark ease of use.
At $399, it adopted Apple’s well-established apply, even at the moment, of not being the most affordable product round. However, like quite a lot of Apple devices, the iPod shortly grew to become the “it” gadget of the day—particularly after including Home windows compatibility in 2002. And, extra to the purpose, its runaway success modified Apple’s fortunes dramatically.
iPod, you pod, all of us pod
For me, the iPod had a momentous private impression too. My first iPod was the first-generation mannequin, and it modified the way in which that I consumed music. Like each teenager and faculty scholar of my period, I’d carried round a CD participant and a kind of seemingly ubiquitous folios of CDs. The head I may aspire to was the six-disc CD changer in my pal’s Volkswagen Jetta—a tool so cumbersome, it needed to stay within the automotive’s trunk.
However the iPod was additionally far and away from Apple’s most distinguished product after I began working at Macworld in 2006, already five years after the device’s release. I minimize my enamel reviewing an countless slew of iPod instances and different equipment. I walked the halls of the Client Electronics Present within the days when it appeared like all people was attempting to capitalize on the iPod’s success, prefixing all their merchandise with “i” or constructing 30-pin dock connectors into something that would match them. White earbuds, each Apple’s and the not rare imitations, had been ubiquitous.
The iPod outlined Apple within the 2000s and, for some time, it appeared as if it was such an amazing, world-beating product that its success may by no means probably ebb.
What goes up
In that period, it typically appeared just like the iPod can be the hit product within the historical past of Apple, however on reflection, its prime lasted lower than a decade. That authentic mannequin was adopted by revamps and new variations—the mini, the nano, the shuffle—however simply six years later, “a widescreen iPod with contact controls” referred to as the iPhone got here alongside and ate its lunch.
With out the iPod, the iPhone may not have ever arrived.
Michael Simon/IDG
The complete-size iPod was discontinued in 2014 after it had spent 5 years with out an replace. The nano and shuffle lasted till 2017. In the present day, the iPod lives on solely within the iPod contact, which, to be honest, bears much more resemblance to the iPhone than any iPod. (The iPod itself was, at one level, basically lowered to an app on the iPhone, which bore an icon of the little music participant, however even that’s lengthy gone now.)
In 2008, on the peak recognition of the machine, Apple bought 54.8 million iPods. Whereas Apple not studies unit gross sales of its merchandise, within the latter half of the 2010s it was, on common, promoting that many iPhones each quarter. The distinction, from this vantage, is obvious: basically, the iPod was at all times a tool constructed for leisure, and thus, a luxurious. Smartphones have, by comparability, turn out to be an precise necessity for many individuals’s lives.
Twenty years on from the iPod’s introduction, it’s odd to consider a time the place Apple’s greatest product was largely for listening to music. However although its period could also be behind us now, its legacy survives within the type of Apple itself. The iPod paved the way in which for the super and unprecedented success that Apple has seen. With out it elevating Apple’s profile and bolstering its backside line, it’s unlikely that the corporate may have gotten to the purpose the place it may launch the iPhone… or the iPad… or the Apple Watch… or no matter comes subsequent. It’s not overstating issues to say that Apple owes all of its success to that little white rectangle and the longer term it introduced with it.