Today marks a decade of success for the iPod. Launched on October 23, 2001 by Steve Jobs, it transformed the way music is purchased and disseminated. The first model boasted a 5GB hard drive, a mechanical scroll wheel and a Firewire connection. It can hold up to a thousand songs with battery life that can last up to 10 hours. The design was an obvious output of designer Jonathan Ive’s passion for beauty, simplicity and convenience.
Apple annually releases an update of the iPod, and it has always been better each time, with increased storage capacity, a color display, the addition of flash memory, then video and touchscreen capabilities later on. It truly changed the landscape of the music industry, and was the beginning of the personal cloud as we know it today.
Though it was neither the first nor the cheapest digital music player, with Apple’s iTunes music software, the loading and unloading of music off the device was seamless. There was nothing quite like it at the time.
Apple also solved one of the biggest digital problems back then: how to not get in trouble with music labels. The only two ways to get digital music back in the days was via P2P or ripping your own CD. Napster, a P2P file sharing site, was playing outside the rules of the music labels, and in due course suffered a horrible death right around the time of the iPod’s launch.
To avoid the same fatality, Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, a virtual store developed around digital rights management. The store boasts a catalogue of 200,000 music from the five big record labels EMI, Universal, Warner, Sony Music Entertainment and BMG. It has succeeded where many companies have failed.
The iPod is not merely a device. It’s culture whose presence exists everywhere, even in the hands of a Mursi woman in Southern Ethiopia, along with her AK47.
Below is an infographic detailing the story of the iPod from inception to date, even extending to the iPhone and iPad, and the eventual death of its leader Steve Jobs who has been struggling with cancer since 2004.
