A Quarter Century Ago, Apple Put 1,000 Songs in Your Pocket
Twenty-five years ago today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs walked onto the stage of the Town Hall auditorium at the company's Infinite Loop headquarters in Cupertino and teased "a breakthrough digital device that's not a Mac." It was the original iPod, advertised, as MacRumors recalls, as offering "1,000 songs in your pocket."
The first iPod cost $399 in the US and £349 in the UK, according to TechRadar. It worked only with a Mac running iTunes, syncing music and charging over a FireWire cable that could move an entire CD in under 10 seconds.
Inside was a 5GB hard drive holding about 1,000 songs, a monochrome LCD and a mechanical scroll wheel with a center select button designed for one-handed use. MacRumors notes it played for up to 10 hours on a charge and automatically synced songs and playlists from the owner's iTunes library.
According to Melamorsicata's anniversary history, the first iPod went from project to launch in about eight months, with Jon Rubinstein leading hardware and Tony Fadell, later called the father of the iPod, driving the program. Copywriter Vinnie Chieco coined the name, inspired by the "open the pod bay doors" line from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Apple's anniversary framing sticks to its long-held position: the iPod ranks among the company's most significant products, the one that expanded it beyond the Mac and turned a computer maker into a mass-market consumer electronics brand.
Contemporary reaction was split. TechRadar recalls verdicts ranging from a "glorified consumer gimmick" to simply the best digital music player of its day. Tom's Hardware writes that few people in the room grasped that a device the size of a deck of cards would remake an industry.
Two years after the hardware, Apple opened the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003 with 200,000 tracks at 99 cents each, sold as singles rather than whole albums. As The Spokesman-Review puts it, buyers usually wanted only a few songs but had been forced to pay for entire albums or pricey singles. That October, iTunes came to Windows, opening the pairing to PC owners.
The record industry took the hit and the lifeline at once: legal 99-cent singles offered an answer to file-sharing piracy and rewrote distribution. Apple was transformed in return, as the iPod pulled Windows users into its ecosystem and paved the road for the 2007 iPhone, whose sales passed the iPod in 2011. Europa Press traces the arc to May 2022, when Apple retired the line; the Chicago Tribune puts lifetime sales at an estimated 450 million units.
For the 25th anniversary Apple did not revive the hardware. Instead, reports The Verge, any nonexistent Apple Music page now serves up a fully interactive first-generation iPod. 9to5Mac found the scroll wheel works by click and drag with 90-second song previews, while PCMag counts 1,029 playable tracks plus a 22-song anniversary playlist running from Gorillaz to U2. No subscription required.