20 years of iPod
This is how Apple changed the world of music
The first iPod used the so-called “click wheel”.
© Alena Veasey / Shutterstock.com
Apple helped revolutionize the music market from 2001 onwards. That’s the story of the iPod.
In times of Spotify, Soundcloud and Co., the beginnings of portable digital music are easily forgotten. It’s good that an anniversary is a reminder of how little it was once taken for granted to have the whole world of music in your pocket. From 2001 onwards, Apple made a decisive contribution to revolutionizing the digital music market with the iPod, even if there were portable MP3 players before that. A look at more than 20 years of technical progress.
For years, Moore’s Law was doomed for Apple and his father, Steve Jobs (1955-2011). It says that the complexity and performance of circuit boards and memory technology doubles at regular intervals. Both Apple’s Macintosh (1984) and the iMac (1998) were doomed for the company. Because despite all the technical innovation that was in the devices: The development time sometimes took so long that the built-in hardware no longer seemed to justify the price of the devices relatively soon after it was released.
Apple changed the portable music market
So what was needed was what Steve Jobs and Apple had stood for since the late 1970s: real innovation. What happened to Apple was that hard drives were getting smaller and smaller around the turn of the millennium. Jon Rubinstein, who has accompanied Jobs as an employee since 1990 and played a decisive role in the development of the iMac, had the idea for the iPod in early 2001 based on the world’s first 1.8-inch hard drive. Only about six months later, on October 23, 2001, the first iPod with five gigabytes of storage space was presented.
Jobs’ presentation has cult status today, as it comes from another time. Although in his classic outfit of turtleneck sweater and jeans, but in front of a comparatively tiny audience and with a Power Point presentation that many students can do better nowadays, he presented the device, which was revolutionary for the time. In the future, you can carry up to 1,000 songs in your pocket without cassettes or CDs. In addition, there was the innovative user interface and the famous “Click Wheel” with which the owner can efficiently scroll through their music collection.
The hour of birth of Apple as a lifestyle product
The device was a complete success and is often referred to as the birth of today’s Apple brand core. From then on, the company used Moore’s Law to its own advantage: a version updated to ten gigabytes of memory appeared just six months after the first iPod. In mid-July 2002, the storage capacity doubled again, to 20 GB – Apple also released its first headphones that had a remote control integrated into the cable.
A few months later, Apple presented the third generation, which was also outdated in terms of design, and the memory had grown again. In September 2003, Apple sold the millionth device. Various variants of the iPod followed, including the “Mini”, “Nano”, “Shuffle”, “Photo” and “Touch” series. The latter is the only iPod still available today, and thanks to the touch display it is hardly noticeably different from a smartphone. The “mini” version presented in 2004 was particularly successful: presented in January, Apple had received more than 100,000 pre-orders by mid-February.
Gigantic success at the right time – then came the smartphones
The real peculiarity of the iPod, however, was the iTunes previously introduced by Apple. While users from other manufacturers had to manually copy their MP3 files from one device to the other, iPod owners were able to easily synchronize their music collection between iMac, iBook and iPod. The subsequent success of the combination of iPod and iTunes was so great that in 2007 almost half of Apple’s sales were generated through the iPod – by April of the same year, Apple had sold 100 million iPods.
Because Apple and Jobs apparently learned from past mistakes, it was clear that they couldn’t be relied on. Once before, in the early 1980s, the company was dependent on the sale of a single product: At that time it was one of the first mass-market personal computers, the Apple II. So in early 2007, in the midst of the greatest success of the iPod, Jobs rang a new one Era and presented the first iPhone. The rest is history, since then Apple has become one of the most valuable corporations in the world.