The rise and fall of the iPod
For those of us too old to have been born at the heart of the streaming era but too young to have ever owned a Walkman, the iPod was likely the first touchpoint for having all our favourite tunes at our fingertips. My first iPod Shuffle was given to me at around seven years old, and I remember being fascinated by the fact that this tiny clip-on device could somehow hold all the music I could ever want.
Its capacity of 500 tracks blew my tiny mind – “That’s more songs than I’ll ever know!”, I remember thinking. Yet approaching two decades down the line, we laugh at the naivety – those tiny little music players, trusty as they might have been, were only the very beginning of a behemoth changing of the tides in how we consume tunes, and now they’ve been left as a relic product of the past.
Times and technology have evolved – as has the Apple arsenal of kit – but aside from phones, laptops, and tablets, the humble iPod was the perfect portable companion for music listening in the early part of the 21st century. So, what’s the story behind it? Having been launched in 2001 as a product pairing with the desktop version of iTunes, the iPod went on to change the market entirely and sold approximately 450 million units in its time.
However, with the rise of streaming in your pocket with phones, the iPod eventually met its deathbed in 2022, when Apple permanently discontinued its line. Over the course of its evolution from the Shuffle, to the Nano, to the Classic, and the Touch, the iPod was a cornerstone piece of music tech for a generation, changing the game of our consumption habits for the modern day until its purpose was served.
What was the idea behind the iPod?
The story behind how the iPod got its name and came to take its place in the world is actually surprisingly fascinating, taking its inspiration from both products of the past and visions of the future. Apple founder Steve Jobs wanted to create a reinvented Walkman, finding existing products on the market of portable music players to be too cumbersome to actually use efficiently. As such, the gun was fired in the race to create a streamlined prototype before any other company could get there first.
In terms of the name, it was a freelance copywriter called Vinnie Chieco, who had been brought on board to help with its branding, who was reminded of a very specific scene when he first saw an early version of the product. The classic 2001: A Space Odyssey featured the line “Open the pod bay doors, Hal,” and since the concept of an individual music player reminded him of spacecraft pods, he pitched his million-dollar idea – and never looked back.
By the time you reached the point in evolution of the 7th generation iPod Touch, the product had more or less become like a phone with messaging, FaceTime, social media, and calling features all embedded. It was little surprise, in this respect, when in May 2022 Apple decided to pull the plug on its famed 21st century Walkman, as they had essentially ran their own product into the ground with its own army of more advanced tech swamping it. The final death of the portable music player was done.
