iPod

» see apple.com/ipod as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the ipod was the device that turned apple from a computer company into a consumer-electronics company. steve jobs introduced it on october 23, 2001 with a 5-gigabyte hard drive and the slogan about one thousand songs in your pocket. for most of the next decade it was the most recognizable piece of consumer hardware on earth. in early 2007 it accounted for close to half of apple's quarterly revenue. then the iphone arrived and ate that revenue from the inside.

the last ipod was the seventh-generation touch, released in 2019 with an a10 chip carried over from the iphone 7. apple discontinued it on may 10, 2022. the brand had lasted twenty years and seven months and had sold roughly 450 million units across all variants. it is the longest-running product line apple has ever retired.

in turkey the ipod was a status object before it was a music player. customs duty plus the exchange rate pushed the lira price well above the us shelf price, so you mostly saw them on people who had brought one back from a trip. the rest of us used cheaper korean and chinese players, or just winamp on a desktop pc. the ipod was the thing in the magazine ad, not the thing on the dolmuş.

~ the record ~

~ the click wheel ~

the original ipod had a wheel that rotated mechanically. by the third generation it had become the touch-sensitive click wheel that everyone remembers. you scrolled through thousands of songs with your thumb. the wheel did not need labels because the whole interface was designed around it. nothing else on the market felt like that, and nothing later quite replaced the feeling. multi-touch on the iphone was a better input device, but it was a different one.

the click wheel was also a small argument against complexity. apple had decided that four buttons and a wheel were enough to navigate ten thousand songs. that decision aged better than most ui choices of the decade.

~ what it broke ~

the ipod is one of the reasons the cd died for consumers. it is also one of the reasons the album died as a unit. you could put your whole collection on a single device and shuffle it, which turned music into a stream of singles before streaming services existed. the itunes music store launched in 2003 and made 99-cent singles the default purchase unit, finishing what the device started.

the side effect was that the music industry lost its bundle pricing. you cannot easily charge fifteen dollars for an album when the natural unit on the device is one song for a dollar. spotify and apple music later collapsed the price further. the ipod was the device that opened that door.

~ the long tail ~

by 2010 the iphone had taken over. the ipod kept shipping in slimmer forms, mostly to gift markets and to parents who did not want a cellular contract for a kid. the nano and shuffle got discontinued in 2017. the touch hung on as a developer-test device and as a phone-substitute gift for kids until 2022, when apple finally stopped renewing it.

the ipod is one of the cleanest examples of a product killed by its own creator's next product. usually the killer is a competitor. here apple decided that one device in one pocket was better than two, and chose the side that paid better.

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