Twenty-five years ago, Apple released the iPod. Jason Snell has done the best writing on the topic, and covered the iPod for Macworld from its launch event to its eventual demise. He reflects on the iPod’s launch at Six Colors:
There are barely more than five years between the launch of the iPod and the launch of the iPhone. While both products took time to grow into their markets, I think it’s still the case that the true “iPod era” was only a handful of years long, and it’s been entirely overshadowed by the product that came after it.
That’s a shame, in a way, because I think people who didn’t live through this era don’t understand just what a hit the iPod was. It completely changed Apple’s fortunes, rehabbed its brand identity, gave people reasons to go into Apple’s relatively new retail stores for the first time, and taught Apple lessons that it needed to learn before it could build a smartphone. (The iPhone’s hardware was largely built by the iPod team, even if the software came from the Mac.
The iPod really hit the peak of its popularity when I was in high school. I can confirm that they were their own sort of Cool Currency. Every cool kid had one, or wanted one. If you had one, the music on them became a part of your personality. People wanted to scroll through your iPod and see what was on there. The music on your iPod was a second, deeper level of Cool Currency: were you into whatever was sick at the moment, or were you out?
It was normal to give one earbud to a friend and sit in the hallways during lunch, listening to each other’s music. That was how a lot of us discovered new music. Death Cab for Cutie and Arcade Fire spread through the iPods in my high school like viruses.
Those listening sessions were how I discovered music that was formative to my taste now. A friend introduced me to Slipknot with his iPod (it was “People = Sh”, as it’s known in search engines, and it amazed my little teenage mind and upset my parents). My guitar teacher introduced me to Metallica around the same time, and both of those bands changed the trajectory of my life in unexpected ways.
Another friend introduced me to Nine Inch Nails (“The Hand That Feeds”), which ignited a love for industrial rock and metal, then a love for techno. Exposure to Trent Reznor would later lead me to David Fincher (see “Closer” appearing in Seven), which would help turn me into a lover of movies. Reznor also led me, like so many others, to Johnny Cash (you know the song — a cover so wildly powerful that Reznor has said the song is no longer his, but Johnny’s).
The iPod was how a bunch of kids in youth group snuck Jay‑Z and Eminem into their homes. No jewel cases necessary. It was my trojan house to counterculture. I mean, we torrented everything. Of course we did! It was high school in the early 2000s; we ripped off every record label under the sun. We didn’t think of it as stealing. Nobody even thought of it as piracy. To us, it was the same as burning each other discs, which we did all the time before the iPod came along. This was just more convenient, and a little more private. Besides, there was no iTunes Store at the time. Apple Music didn’t exist. How were a bunch of thirteen-year-olds supposed to afford a CD collection?
Our attitude was that, if you could never buy it in the first place, it wasn’t stealing. It was a license to enter the culture for ourselves and to make something ours, without having to ask for permission. Honestly, our blasé attitude towards piracy reminds me a lot about the ethical issues surrounding LLMs today. Even then, the world wasn’t prepared for how radically technology would challenge the law.
The iPod was also an introduction to the Mac — not just for the market, but for me.
For a lot of people, the iPod was what persuaded them to try out that other thing Apple makes — the iMac. As Jason points out, the iPod changed Apple’s fortunes forever. It had a tremendous ripple effect.
I know a couple people who started buying Macs after the iPod came out. One was my high school drama teacher, who put a bondi blue iMac in one of his classrooms.
It was my first experience with a Mac. I just happened to sit at it one day to do some word processing. It wasn’t special. But it just made sense to me. Computers hadn’t made sense to me before, and yet, it felt like I intuitively knew how to use this one. Apple says this stuff a lot in their marketing, and I know it’s not true for many people, but for me, it seriously worked out.
I loved it so much I spent years convincing my parents to buy me a Mac. I talked about it so much they bought me my university laptop when I was in the twelfth grade, just to shut me up. I wore the plastic in that white MacBook down to the… well, down to whatever is beneath the plastic.
I didn’t live near an Apple Store. I don’t know how I would have experienced a Mac if it weren’t for that drama teacher in high school. And without the Mac, I would never have “discovered” design. I wouldn’t have my job.
I can directly trace or relate the iPod to my career, my passions for music and film, and much of the music I still love and enjoy today.
Long live the iPod.
(Jason Snell also wrote twenty-five things you might not know about the iPod for Tom’s Guide, which is also an excellent read.)