iPod changed the world a quarter of a century ago

One day the iPod was everywhere and the next it was nowhere. But this device that propelled Apple toward the iPhone may never be forgotten.

It surprised the world that Apple, of all companies, was the one to produce a hit music player when so many others had failed. But then it absolutely shocked the world when Apple itself killed it off.

In retrospect, the iPod was a light bulb product. Suddenly it was switched on and it was everywhere, but then just as suddenly it was switched off and gone forever.

Or nearly forever. It's now a quarter of a century since it was first announced on October 23, 2001 and from when it first appeared in stores on November 10 that year. All these years on, the iPod is gone yet seemingly never forgotten.

You may be among the (literally) millions of people who remember it fondly. Or you might be among the brave few trying to relaunch it in the hope that Apple won't notice.

Either way, the iPod was enormously successful, enormously popular, it changed the world in so many ways, and then it vanished.

Or at least the device itself did. A quarter of a century on, we have the podcast industry that the iPod created, and named.

The first day

As we say, it wouldn't actually ship until November 10, 2001, but on October 23 of that year, Steve Jobs talked to press in what now seems like such a small room.

"We lured you here today," he told them, "with the promise of unveiling a breakthrough digital device that's not a Mac."

Jobs did then hype up the Mac during his typical scene-setting before the real unveiling. In this case, at this time, he argued that the Mac could be the center of people's lives, working with their other devices.

It's a very odd presentation to look back on because the opening ten minutes or so have Steve Jobs talking up and then demonstrating Apple's iWork apps like iTunes and iMovie.

Even back then, these were known, none of this was new. And there's a sense of patient waiting from the room.

And then Jobs makes the pitch they've come for, the pitch that would show how Apple was going to take on all of the existing MP3 players. "As we've been designing these apps, of course we've been paying a lot of attention to the devices," said Jobs. "We want it to work with all of the coolest devices and we have to learn everything about these devices to make our iApps work."

"So the iApps know all about these devices, but the thought occurred to us late last year that the devices don't know anything the iApps," he continued. "There's never been a device that's been built that can take advantage of all this amazing intelligence built into these apps running on a Mac."

Why music

Jobs had actually built up to announcing a music player in such a way that he could even have taken a left turn and revealed a camera. He was pushing Apple as the answer to everything, and saying it was starting with music because "we love music."

But there was a practical side to this, and it was to do with how big a market music is. "Music's been around forever, it will always be around," said Jobs, "[so this] is not a speculative market."

Calling a global market, Jobs made the case that everyone was then living through a digital music revolution, and yet there was a problem. There was no market leader, and even large firms like Sony "haven't had a hit yet."

Steve Jobs claimed that Apple had found the recipe to making the best music player, the best audio product. "And that product is called iPod," he said.

No reaction. Jobs was delivering this speech with the same precision as for the iPhone and iPad launches, and with the same persuasive reality-distorting tone. But the small audience was not whooping or cheering.

Perhaps that was because iPod didn't immediately mean anything, where it would later be obvious what iPhone meant. Reportedly, Apple chose the name because the prototype somehow reminded copywriter Vinnie Chieco of the famous line "Open the pod bay doors, Hal," from "2001: A Space Odyssey."

If the audience was cold to the name, they warmed up, though, as Jobs turned to specifications, and most especially because he claimed that the iPod held 1,000 songs — and held them in your pocket. He talked about the tiny hard drive, he talked compression rates, and he also talked about FireWire.

Now long-abandoned, FireWire was a dramatically faster way of transferring data between devices than previously. Jobs spelt it out, too. He said that it takes five to ten seconds to load a CD's music onto an iPod using FireWire.

And then he compared iPod to the then-current USB (not USB-C) music players. "On a USB player, you're talking five minutes."

To put all 1,000 songs onto the iPod, it was under 10 minutes. "On a USB player... you get to watch it for five hours while it loads the songs."

Those specifications in full were:

• Capacity: 5GB (a 10GB model followed later)
• Screen: 160 pixel by 128 pixels with backlight
• Audio: 60-mW amplifier for "CD-quality sound"
• Played: MP3, MP3 VBR (variable bit rate), AIFF and WAV
• Price: $399

That $399 in 2001 is the equivalent of around $760 in 2026, so this was far from a cheap device.

But it worked. You could pick it up and immediately know how to play music, and how to find particular tracks or artists.

It perhaps took a little bit of reading the manual to know how to connect your iPod to your Mac, or then to Windows.

But compared to how fiddly most other MP3 players had been, the iPod was the right device at the right time. Even if it still took a couple of years before it became the ubiquitous device that it did.

So many iPods

Depending on how you counted it — whether you include spec bump updates or not — there were eventually around 28 models of iPod. Those broke down into categories:

• iPod (later called iPod Classic)
• iPod photo
• iPod mini
• iPod nano
• iPod shuffle
• iPod touch

As well as eventually issuing an iPod photo, Apple would add a version of the iPod with video.

Not all of these models were a hit, but most were. Possibly the only one to get generally poor reviews was the iPod shuffle, but that still had four generations from 2005 to 2010.

The iPod shuffle was the only iPod without a screen and the idea was that you just let it play rather than trying to find particular tracks.

If that one was comparatively a flop, the idea of the iPod was such a hit that it is yet another product that transformed Apple. The iMac saved it from bankruptcy and the iPhone set it on the road to trillions of dollars, but the iPod played a part.

It was the iPod that showed Apple was a consumer electronics firm rather than a solely computer one. It was arguably one element that also helped Apple gain a reputation for being late to a market, yet then transforming it.

Make no mistake, either, the iPod was transformative. If it's surprising that previous music players were comparatively poor, though, it's got to be even more surprising how rivals failed to follow Apple's lead in usability.

Microsoft tried, but even it took five years more to produce its Zune music player. This was back when Microsoft would do things like creating marketing terms such as "Plays For Sure," but not actually have its Zune play much at all.

That attempt to beat the iPod took half a decade to come out, and then Microsoft killed it after another half a decade. That Zune was such a flop that you may not have even noticed it was gone.

But then the iPod was a startling success and yet you may not know when that ended. If you've noticed that no one has iPods anymore or that Apple doesn't sell them, you might still be surprised to learn that the end came in 2022.

Multiple endings

May 2022 was when the last iPod was discontinued, and this iPod touch then remained on sale only until stocks ran out. It was a very quiet ending to such a worldwide runaway hit.

Except May 2022 was more like the eventual turning off life support when the device was already long gone. Six years after Steve Jobs's rather low-key, small-scale presentation of the iPod, Apple announced the iPhone.

Specifically because of how successful the iPod had been, that Steve Jobs presentation was more how we remember them all. His style was the same, his way of building up to a point was the same, but now he was doing it in front of a large and very enthusiastic audience.

Today that presentation is an easier watch than the iPod one because it's slick and if iPhone features have changed, they've really just developed. Seeing how they started is fascinating.

It was at the time, too, but a key difference between then and now is how Steve Jobs really had to include one thing in his sales pitch. He had to tell the audience that Apple was launching what he described as a "widescreen iPod with touch controls."

The fact that the new device was a phone was ultimately the key thing, but right at that moment, iPod was so hot that it had to be namechecked. It was a selling point.

Perhaps you could have predicted that the iPhone would make the iPod obsolete, and certainly Apple did. Apple reasoned that it was better for them to make an iPod killer than wait for a rival to do it.

Naturally, Apple wouldn't say that aloud then or now, and shortly after the iPhone launched, it brought out the iPod touch.

Only, where the iPhone had to be called a type of iPod, at least once, things changed even by September 2006 when the iPod touch was announced. By the time it was, it was seen as an iPhone without the phone.

The torch might still have been blazing, but it had been passed on.

Gone, forgotten, and remembered

If you still have a working iPod, you may now be able to update it and even work with AirPods. Sprout Pi Mainboard is a crowdfunding project that promises to bring your iPod into the 2020s.

Search eBay for "iPod" and that's the rest of your day taken up as you go through hundreds of listings. The volume of them is partly because there were so many versions, partly because so many were sold, but also because they're popular and they sell.

Some listings say that their iPods have new batteries in them. But at the very least, you're buying a used device that is four years old, and potentially 25 years old.

So maybe you can't expect them to perform as they did, to have the battery life that they once had. And if it's really just the music you're buying for, then an iPhone will do that and more.

It's likely, though, that iPods are being bought as much for nostalgia as for audio quality. And people's memories of this device are so strong that some companies and individuals have tried to take advantage.

So in 2025, a 3D modeller launched the iFidget. It looks like an iPod and it has familiar scroll wheel, but it doesn't play music.

The iFidget solely exists to bring back memories of the clicking sound when you rotated that wheel to make a selection.

It might not be playing music, but it is very definitely designed like an iPod. Then in October 2026, a startup called New Matter announced the Sudo music player, and you already know what it looks like.

That's not the first iPod clone and it won't be the last. But whether firms do this out of love or just want to make cash from people who do love the iPod, there is plenty of affection going around.

A quarter of a century after it launched, and four years since Apple stopped making it, the iPod still has its fans.