Although it would not be until 2007 when Apple presented the iPhone, this does not mean that the brand does not have decades of life, and that other products were launched before the famous mobile phones, as is the case of the iPod, which was released exactly 24 years ago, a November 10, 2001.
Today, we will review the product, what it meant for Apple and the world, and how it evolved. Many of our readers would not have even been born in that year, so for many, it will be an unknown product that they never got to try.
What the first iPod was like in 2001
The iPod turns 24: the first model reached customers' hands in November 2001, after a brief presentation in October. At its launch it impressed by including a hard drive of 5 GB in a player portable (which allowed for many songs, and not just a little more than 1 hour, like traditional CDS) and for its design (a device that, at the time, made it clear that Apple wanted to change the way we listened to music, being one of the first releases that would change the world of technology at the time).
Before the debut, there were tons of rumors (from names like “iWalk” to crazy ideas about handwriting on your screen). Some predictions went too far; Others got the essentials right: it was a digital player that synchronized with the computer. Public reactions were mixed: high prices, complaints about sound quality and for being initially “Mac only”, but also a lot of excitement and long launch queues that anticipated the subsequent iPhone fever.
Subsequently, With the iPhone capable of doing everything the iPod did, the player lost that sales boom. Apple officially left the iPod line in 2022. Still, according to company executives, “the spirit of the iPod lives on” in products like the iPhone, Apple Watch and HomePod. While it's unlikely we'll need a music-only player today, Apple could somewhat include iPods in future home devices.
Simply put: the iPod not only carried songs in your pocket, it helped Apple achieve evolution in this type of productsreaching the iPhone and the rest of them, and that is why it continues to be celebrated, 24 years later. It was one of those launches that, although they currently seem very “normal” to us, changed the way we see technology today, and if it were not for this, the iPhone could have taken much longer to arrive, and today we would not have what we have.
And you, have you been lucky enough to be able to have one in your hands? It is true that it had many drawbacks, especially the price. However, its convenience and novelty, since it was not so easy to have thousands of songs in something so small, made it little by little become something more, to the point of currently paying thousands of euros for a sealed version of it, both for collecting purposes and for the meaning it has in technological evolution. Leave us a comment with your opinion about it.
