Apple announces the first iPod

On October 23, 2001, Apple introduces the iPod, a portable digital music player that revolutionized the music industry and transformed the consumption of audio and eventually video content. Its minimalist, user-friendly design also helped reshape Apple from primarily a computer company to a consumer device titan and paved the way for the iPhone.

As digital music gained popularity, consumers traded portable cassette and CD players for MP3 players, but the early models were not user-friendly and could hold only a limited number of songs. Seeing a market opportunity, Apple CEO Steve Jobs brought Tony Fadell on board to help develop the iPod in early 2001. The team worked on an aggressive timeline to get the device on store shelves in time for the holiday season. They beat their deadline, and the original iPod went on sale on November 10, 2001.

About the size of a deck of cards, the first iPod featured a center selection button and four additional control buttons circling its signature mechanical scroll wheel, which let users browse by turning the wheel. Its clean interface, which even lacked an on/off switch, along with its white front, stainless steel back and trademark white earbuds helped make the iPod a design icon. Priced at $399, the device had a backlit screen, up to 10 hours of battery life and a 5-gigabyte hard drive that could hold as many as 1,000 songs, allowing many users to carry their entire music libraries in their pockets. “With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again,” Jobs declared.

Initial iPod sales were solid—about 350,000 in the first year—but not phenomenal partly because the device initially only worked with Apple’s computers. Sales took off after the company released a Windows-compatible version in 2002, followed by the 2003 debut of the iTunes Music Store, where consumers could legally purchase downloadable music from a vast catalog. Together, the iPod and iTunes Music Store helped upend the music industry’s album-based business model by popularizing single-song purchases, accelerating the shift from CDs to digital downloads.

In 2005, Apple introduced downloads for podcasts—which partially took their names from the iPod—and a video screen on its fifth-generation iPod classic to play television shows and movies. Apple ultimately released 37 versions of the iPod across five broad categories—classic, mini, shuffle, nano and touch—and sold an estimated 450 million devices. But the company’s iPhone, introduced in 2007 with built-in music and video playback capabilities, gradually made the iPod obsolete. Apple discontinued the last remaining model, the iPod touch, in 2022.