Happy 10th Anniversary, iPod

Despite speculation that Apple was going to axe some iPod models this year, the company has eliminated none of the existing models and even kept the iPod classic, the player that resembles the original 2001 iPod the most.

This month (on October 23 to be precise), Apple iPod is ten years old. The player marked a shift in paradigm in the music industry, not only from a hardware standpoint, but also from a software point of view.

The iPod was marketed by Apple in 2001 as an “ultra-portable MP3 music player” that “puts 1,000 songs in your pocket”. Ten years ago, the ability to carry 1,000 songs with you anywhere was breathtaking. Think about it. People still carried walkman cassette-players around back then.

And although some enjoyed the luxury of listening to higher-quality sound on the go with portable CD players, Apple, led by Steve Jobs, envisioned something far more portable and even fashionable too.

“With iPod, Apple has invented a whole new category of digital music player that lets you put your entire music collection in your pocket and listen to it wherever you go,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO at the time. “With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again.”

The company’s 2011 press release said the iPod represented “the next generation of portable music players that store music on an internal hard drive, yet are only 20 percent of the volume of today’s hard drive-based players.”

The player had a 5 GB hard drive and featured up to 20 minutes of shock protection for nonstop playback.

It transferred songs over FireWire (an Apple-supported connectivity standard at the time). According to its makers, the player let you download an entire CD in under 10 seconds and 1,000 songs in less than 10 minutes. That was 30 times faster than USB-based players at the time.

The original iPod also featured a 160-by-128-pixel high-resolution display, with a white LED backlight.