Remember CDs, MP3 players and digital jukeboxes? On Oct. 23, 2001, Apple CEO Steve Jobs put them on the path to becoming obsolete when he unveiled the very first iPod, which he described as a "quantum leap in listening to music."
The late Apple CEO's words turned out to be prophetic, as 14 years later, the iPod has become the gold standard in portable music, with the capacity to hold most people's entire music library in its onboard hard drive.
An estimated 400 million iPod Classic, Nano, Touch and Shuffles have been sold worldwide, and the music player's core functionality has also been rolled into Apple's iPhone design. And while there have been several challengers to the iPod over the years, none of them have achieved the widespread popularity and impacted the music industry the way the iPod has.
The story of the wildly successful iPod goes back to Oct. 23, 2001, when Steve Jobs took the stage at a special Apple event, wearing his signature jeans and black turtleneck, to unveil a product teased only as a "breakthrough digital device that's not a Mac."
Jobs began his presentation by running through the various portable music options on the market at the time, which included CDs, MP3 CDs, mini-MP3 players and digital jukeboxes with built-in hard drives. Most of those options offered only about 15 songs worth of storage, but Jobs declared he was ready to take on (and take down) the 1,000-song digital jukebox market with a new Apple product.
"No one has really found the recipe yet for digital music," Jobs said on stage, before declaring his intention to "find the recipe" using the Apple brand.
He then unveiled the product name, "iPod," before launching into an explanation of the three core design features: ultra-portability, ease of use and automatic synchronization with Apple's iTunes music manager. "This amazing little device holds 1,000 songs, and it goes right in my pocket," Jobs said. "It's never been this fast or this easy before."
Jobs' audience at the event was suitably appreciative, but there were no superfans in the crowd that day, and the announcement was nothing like the hyped-up, highly stylized presentation Apple puts on these days.
Still, Jobs brought his own enthusiasm and style to the event, playing some songs from his own playlist to demonstrate how the iPod worked. "I'm dating myself here," he said, while queueing up the Beatles' "I Should Have Known Better."
Other songs Jobs played included:
- "Building a Mystery" by Sarah McLachlan
- Bach's "Prelude, Cello Suite No. 1," performed by Yo-Yo Ma
- "Tsunami" by Southern All Stars
- "If I Fell" by the Beatles
That first iPod was about the size of a deck of cards, with five gigabytes of storage (about 1,000 songs), 10 hours of music-playing battery life, and an Apple FireWire cable for rapid charging and synchronizing.
Jobs called the iPod the "first complete and seamless MP3 music solution," making it possible for someone to bring their entire music library with them wherever they went.
"There's been nothing like this before, and I don't think there's another company that could do this," Jobs said.
The first iPod went on sale Nov. 10, 2001, at a cost of $399 in the United States. It was designed exclusively for use with Apple products at the time, but Windows-only versions were launched the following year, and by 2003, third-generation iPods and iTunes could be used on any Mac or PC on the market.
Sales of the iPod were slow initially, with less than 1 million units sold in the first year. But numbers quickly began to pick up in 2004, surging into the 10 million and then 100 million range, before surpassing 400 million by 2015.
Suggested playlist
If you were one of the first to buy an iPod on Nov. 10, 2001, here's a suggested playlist, based on the top songs on the U.S., Canadian, Australian and U.K. charts that year (and if you held onto your 15-song MP3 player, this list would still fit on there just fine):
- "Fallin'" – Alicia Keys
- "I'm Real" – Jennifer Lopez
- "Bootylicious" – Destiny's Child
- "Completely" – Serial Joe
- "U Remind Me" – Usher
- "Lady Marmalade" – Christina Aguilera, Lil' Kim, Mya and Pink
- "All for You" – Janet Jackson
- "Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)" – Train
- "I Hope You Dance" – Lee Ann Womack
- "Because I Got High" – Afroman
- "Family Affair" – Mary J. Blige
- "Hanging By A Moment" – Lifehouse
