first iPod

In the fall of 2001, Apple introduced its first iPod. It was quite large by today’s standards, two inches thick. The music in it was stored on a hard disk five gigabyteswhich allowed you to download close to the player thousands of songs.

One of the most important features of the iPod was the way it was navigated: to navigate between songs or menu items, you had to move your finger on the wheel in the center of the player. In later models, the mechanical wheel was replaced by a touch wheel and the buttons were placed directly under it, but the principle remained the same.

Introduced in 2001 iPad / Apple Photo

iPod success

The first model of the actress became wildly popular. This was facilitated by the quality and attention to detail later articulated by journalists and commentators. But the iPod wasn’t like the revolutionary gadget that Apple placed.

• However, the line was extremely successful: for the first 10 years the company sold 300 million players and also occupied 78 percent of the portable music device market.
• About the total number of iPods sold today 450 million.

With the advent of “smart” multifunctional phones, the popularity of devices such as music players began to decline. Apple slightly changed the approach to the design and functionality of the device and started to make it a little smaller, but the market was doomed to catching up with a fundamentally new type of device. In the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007, Steve Jobs presented it as a combination of iPod, phone and Internet access device.

A change in the pattern of purchasing certain albums and songs also helped the decline in players’ popularity; this was gradually replaced by a streaming model that required a fast Internet connection, not a large disk.

Stopping iPod sales

Meanwhile, Apple ended the sale of the iPod Classic in 2014. It then stopped production of the iPod Nano and Shuffle in 2017.

iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle / Apple Photo

Now the company has discontinued the iPod Touch, which looks a lot like the iPhone, and shuts down the line of players that has been around for more than two decades. For now, players can still be purchased, but only until stocks of pre-made gadgets are left in warehouses and stores. It may take a long time for the iPod to disappear from the shelves.