Shortly after the death of Steve Jobs, the chief executive and co-founder of Apple Inc., his revolutionary creation, the iPod, celebrated its tenth birthday Oct. 23, 2011.
Before the iPod, portable music players were clunky and poorly-constructed. That was before the release of Apple Inc.’s iPod First Generation on Oct. 23, 2001.
The iPod First Generation, which used a mechanical scrolling wheel to navigate music, was $400 and sold wildly. It held between five and 10 GB of memory and only 10 hours of battery. The iPod First Generation was only compatible with Mac and could only connect through Firewire.
The reign of the iPod continued though.
The iPod struck again on April 28, 2003 with the Third Generation, which was now compatible with a USB drive. It also become more advanced in memory capacity and in battery life. With the iPod becoming more popular and more advanced, iTunes, an online media library, was launched the same day the Third Generation was released. Within a week, iTunes sold one million songs (then only 99-cents). The year of 2003 was also a landmark as the millionth iPod was sold.
The year of 2004 brought on an iPod invasion with the iPod Photo, the iPod Fourth Generation, and the iPod Mini First Generation. iPods continued being produced in bulk, as 2005 brought the iPod Fifth Generation, the iPod Nano First Generation, the iPod Mini Second Generation, and the iPod Shuffle First Generation.
The year 2007 became a landmark for the iPod industry as it produced the iPod Touch First Generation, a revolutionary device that was operated via a touch screen. In the same year, the iPhone was created. This device combined an iPod Touch with a conventional cell phone.
iTunes was pronounced the number one U.S. music retailer on April 3, 2008 and had officially sold five billion songs by June that same year.
Apple once again revolutionized the industry in April 2010 with the iPad, with 15 million sold by December of that year.
A number of iPod generations have been created throughout the years with innovations in size,weight, capacity, battery life, and video and photo capability. All of this was set in motion by the original First Generation iPod. With such progress made in just 10 years, it is hard to imagine how far the iPod will go in the future.
Jobs may have passed, but it was not without a legacy of accomplishments that could be viewed on anyone’s iTunes library.
