The History of the Apple iPod

Apple unveiled the first iPod on October 23, 2001. It was a 5GB device capable of holding 1,000 songs and packaged with a now-iconic pair of white headphones. The device was designed by Apple’s then-Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, Jonathan Ive, and a group of hardware engineers who developed the product less than one year after Steve Jobs gave them the task of creating a music player. The design took cues from Dieter Rams’s 1953 Braun T3 radio and featured a wheel interface inspired by Bang & Olufsen’s BeoCom 6000 telephone. The first-generation iPod retailed for $399 and the name "iPod" reportedly came from a freelance copyrighter who was reminded of a line from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, "Open the pod bay door, Hal!", after seeing the prototype. The second-generation device debuted in June 2002 and was the first iPod that offered compatibility for Windows PC users. The 2003 version added storage options up to 40GB and offered an all-touch scroll wheel interface with buttons above it. By 2004, the iPod had become the world’s foremost digital music player; the year's fourth-generation device gained a click-wheel and was debuted alongside the short-lived iPod photo and the iPod mini. The iPod nano and iPod shuffle joined the lineup in 2005 and the iPod touch debuted in 2007 along with the iPod classic 160GB­ — and the world’s first iPhone. The next few years saw various updates to existing iPod models, but by the early 2010s, iPod sales were already declining as more and more customers abandoned their purpose-built music players to carry just one do-it-all device, the iPhone. The last iPod update was to the iPod touch in 2019 and in 2022, the iPod line was officially discontinued. Today, the iPod has been all but completely replaced by multifunctional smartphones, but its legacy lives on and some users still swear by their old devices.