By Jason Snell
The iPod, which set Apple on its course, turns 25
We drove down the freeway from San Francisco to Cupertino with a pretty good idea of what Apple would be announcing, but with no idea how it would transform Apple forever.
“Hint: It’s not a Mac,” read the invitation to an event at the Town Hall conference center on Apple’s campus at Infinite Loop. Rumors abounded that Apple was going to announce a music player, but the details were hazy.
Three of the Macworld editors in the car (but not the other one) were primed to understand what Apple was announcing—we all had multi-gigabyte iTunes libraries already, and when we saw the iPod we realized just how transformative it could be.
Every five years when we hit an anniversary, I struggle to recontextualize the iPod. But this year, for the 25th anniversary, I’ve been thinking about Apple’s little music player a lot more.
That’s because I ended up writing a 12,000-word script for the current series of Designed in California about the origins of the iPod, leading up to its announcement on Oct. 23, 2001, and its release a couple of weeks later.1 I’ve had the iPod front and center in my brain for a while now, in a way it hasn’t been for years.
While Apple had (famously) experimented with non-Mac handheld devices—“Eat Up Martha!”—the iPod was the one that stuck, and changed the company’s fortunes. It’s the moment Apple Computer began its irrevocable journey from being a Mac-only company to becoming Apple Inc., a company that makes all sorts of connected devices.
In researching the Designed in California series, I was struck by just how quickly the iPod’s importance was overshadowed by the iPhone. There are barely more than five years between the launch of the iPod and the launch of the iPhone. While both products took time to grow into their markets, I think it’s still the case that the true “iPod era” was only a handful of years long, and it’s been entirely overshadowed by the product that came after it.
That’s a shame, in a way, because I think people who didn’t live through this era don’t understand just what a hit the iPod was. It completely changed Apple’s fortunes, rehabbed its brand identity, gave people reasons to go into Apple’s relatively new retail stores for the first time, and taught Apple lessons that it needed to learn before it could build a smartphone. (The iPhone’s hardware was largely built by the iPod team, even if the software came from the Mac.)
I’m also struck by how quickly Apple built the iPod. It basically went from idea to product launch in a year. I will admit that things were different then, and Apple’s current scale complicates its ability to launch any product quickly—but even new CEO John Ternus seems to agree that the company should be able to move faster when it needs to.
Not every product can, or should, be made at a breakneck pace. But Apple should have the ability to shift into that higher gear from time to time, when the opportunity arises. I’m not sure today’s Apple is wired that way, and maybe remembering how quickly the iPod came to fruition could serve as a little bit of a prod for Apple to work on getting that capability back.
(If you want to hear much, much more about the iPod, I recommend you listen to or watch the current series of Designed in California.)
- In between those two dates, my daughter was born, and there was a prerelease iPod in the delivery room—but that’s a story for another day. ↩
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