by Trip Mickle, The New York Times Company
The iPod started with a modest goal: Let’s create a music product that would make people want to buy more Macintosh computers. In just a few short years, it would transform the consumer electronics and music industry and make Apple the most valuable company in the world.
First introduced in October 2001, the pocket-sized rectangle with a white face and polished steel frame weighed 6.5 ounces. It came packaged with white earbuds in a custom color, Moon Grey, and held 1,000 songs.
It exploded in popularity in the years that followed, leading to what came to be known as the iPod generation. For much of the 2000s, people walked around the world, with headphones dangling from their ears. The iPod was ubiquitous.
On Tuesday, Apple officially said goodbye to all of them. The company announced that it was phasing out production of its iPod touch, spurring the creation of the iPhone at the end of two decades of the product line and helping to turn Silicon Valley into the epicenter of global capitalism.
Since introducing the iPod in 2001, Apple has sold an estimated 450 million of them, according to Loop Ventures, a venture capital firm specializing in tech research. Last year it sold an estimated 3 million iPods, a fraction of the sales of an estimated 250 million iPhones.
Apple assured customers that music would largely play through the iPhone, which it introduced in 2007, and Apple Music, a 7-year-old service that testifies to customers’ modern preferences. The days of buying and owning 99-cent songs on iPods largely led to monthly subscriptions offering access to an extensive catalog of music.
The iPod provided a blueprint for Apple for decades by delivering unmatched industrial design, hardware engineering, software development, and packaging services. It also demonstrated how the company rarely hit the market with a new product, but often won.
In the late 1990s, the first digital music players began to appear. Early versions could contain a few dozen songs, which allowed people who were in the early days of copying CDs to their computers, to transfer those songs to their pockets.
Steve Jobs, who returned to Apple in 1997 after being ousted for more than a decade, saw the emerging category as an opportunity to give modern appeal to Apple’s aging computer business. A die-hard music fan who ranked the Beatles and Bob Dylan among his favorite artists, Jobs thought that harnessing people’s love for music would help persuade him to switch from Microsoft-powered personal computers to Macintoshes , which had more than 90% market share. share.
“You didn’t have to do any market research,” said John Rubinstein, who led Apple’s engineering at the time. “Everybody loved the music.”
Rubinstein helped fuel development of the product by discovering a new hard disk drive made by Toshiba during a visit to Japan. The 1.8-inch drive had the capacity to store 1,000 songs. In short, it made possible the size of a Sony Walkman-sized digital player with a multitude of capacities greater than anything else on the market.
The development of the iPod coincided with Apple’s acquisition of a company with MP3 software that would become the basis for iTunes, a digital jukebox that organized people’s music libraries so they could quickly create playlists and transfer songs. It powered Jobs’ vision of how people would buy music in the digital age.
“We think people want to buy their music on the Internet by buying downloads, like they bought LPs, like they bought cassettes, just like they bought CDs,” he said in a 2003 talk.
At the time, a service called Napster was tormenting the music industry, making it possible for people to share any song with anyone around the world for free. Jobs leaned into the music industry’s woes by marketing the new Mac’s ability to copy CDs with the commercial slogan: “Rip. Mix. Kindle.” According to Albie Galuten, an executive at Universal Music Group at the time, the campaign put the music industry in Apple’s corner.
Galuten said the label eventually agreed to sell the songs on iTunes for 99 cents to Apple. “We turned because we didn’t have any leverage,” Galuten said. “The easiest way to fight piracy was with convenience.”
Peter DaSilva, The New York Times
FILE – The new lineup of the Apple iPod nano at an Apple event on September 12, 2012 in San Francisco. After nearly 22 years, Apple is ceasing production of the devices that replaced consumer electronics and led to the creation of the iPhone.
The first-generation iPod’s $399 price tag stoked demand, limiting the company to sales of less than 400,000 units in the first year. Three years later, Apple released the iPod mini, a 3.6-ounce aluminum case that came in silver, gold, pink, blue, and green. It cost $249 and contained 1,000 songs. Sales exploded. By the end of its fiscal year in September 2005, it had sold 22.5 million iPods.
Apple extended the power of the iPod mini by making iTunes available for Windows computers, allowing Apple to introduce its brand to millions of new customers. Although the maneuver would later be declared as a stroke of commercial genius, Jobs opposed it at the time, former officials said.
Soon, iPods were everywhere. “It flew like a rocket,” Rubinstein said.
Still, Jobs inspired Apple to make the iPod smaller and more powerful. Rubinstein said the company stopped production of its most popular product of all time — the iPod mini — to replace it with a slimmer version called the Nano that started at $200. Nano helped the company nearly double its unit sales to 40 million in the following year.
Perhaps the iPod’s most important contribution was its role as a catalyst for the creation of the iPhone. As mobile phone makers began to introduce music-playing devices, Apple executives worried about making the leap to better technology. Jobs decided that if this was going to happen, it should be Apple that did it.
The iPhone continued to attract the mix of software and services that made the iPod successful. The success with iTunes, which allowed customers to back up their iPhones and put music on the device, was mirrored by the development of the App Store, which allowed people to download and pay for software and services.
In 2007, the company dropped its longstanding corporate moniker – Apple Computer Inc. – and became Apple, an electronics juggernaut six years in the making.
“They showed the world they had an atomic bomb, and five years later they had a nuclear arsenal,” said Talal Shamoon, CEO of Intertrust Technologies, a digital rights management company working with the music industry at the time. “After that, there was no shadow of doubt that Apple would own everyone.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.