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Apple’s road to success is paved with many products that no longer exist. Some have simply become redundant thanks to newer products with more functionality, while others were unceremoniously dumped from the Apple product line. So far in this Retro Apple series, we’ve looked at one software product — HyperCard — as well as two pieces of hardware — the QuickTake 100 Digital Camera and the Newton MessagePad 2100. Today we’ll look at a wildly successful Apple product that is still being sold, but in a much different format — the iPod.
Genesis of the iPod
Like many Apple products, the iPod wasn’t the first product of its type to market, but it quickly dominated the market. Digital music players were a logical outgrowth of the Sony Walkman cassette player, which was a compact, battery-powered cassette tape player that came with a pair of wired headphones. While the Walkman and its competitors could simply play one album at a time, digital music players used either flash RAM or a small hard disk to store many songs. All of the devices needed to be connected to a computer (PC or Mac) to download music.
The first digital music players I remember were the Diamond Rio (1998, with 32MB of storage) and the Creative Labs NOMAD Jukebox (2000, with a 6GB microdrive). I resisted the temptation of buying the Diamond Rio, but when the NOMAD appeared, I just had to get one (see photo below).
A Creative Labs NOMAD Jukebox, the dismal state-of-the-art in digital music players a year before the iPod appeared
Frankly, it was horrible. In the first place, it wasn’t Mac-compatible, so I had to use a Windows machine to rip CDs and move the music to the NOMAD Jukebox. Even worse was the built-in user interface. By 2000, I had been using graphical user interfaces for 16 years (with the Mac and Windows), and I honestly think that the NOMAD’s UI was one of the worst I’ve ever seen. I recall accidentally erasing songs when I was trying to play them, frequently erasing full albums!
Apple had discontinued the Newton MessagePad by the time work began on the iPod; the Newton platform was never used as a music player. Seeing public interest in personal media players like the Walkman and the first digital devices, Steve Jobs ordered his hardware engineering chief Jon Rubenstein to build a team to design a product.
The first Apple media player design came together quickly. With engineers like Tony Fadell and Michael Dhuey working on the electronics, and Apple legend Jony Ive working on the design, the team was able to get the product to market within a year.
It helped that Rubenstein had seen a tiny Toshiba hard drive that would be perfect for a digital music player, and he purchased the rights to the drive for Apple. He had also envisioned how the screen, battery, and other components would work together.
The 1958 Braun T3 Transistor Radio, with a design that foreshadowed the first iPod “Classic”
Jony Ive had a relatively easy task. The external design of the first iPod borrowed heavily from the Braun T3 transistor radio designed by Dieter Rams in 1958 (see image above), and the “wheel” used to navigate the iPod user interface was based on the wheel control on the Bang & Olufsen BeoCom 1 cordless phone (image below). Unsurprisingly, Jony Ive counts Rams as a leading influence on his design sensibilities.
The first iPod borrowed the mechanical wheel control design on the Bang & Olufsen Beocom 1 cordless phone
The first iPod
The first iPod model was released on October 23, 2001. It was Mac-only to begin with; Jobs rightly assumed that people would be so enthralled with the iPod that they would purchase Macs in order to load them up with music. That first device had a 5GB hard drive built-in that was touted to “put 1,000 songs in your pocket”, and came with the now-iconic white earbuds that were featured in the famous silhouette ads (see example below).
The initial ads featured a dancing actor, but when people referred to him as an “iClod”, advertising agency Chiat/Day came up with the idea of using dancers silhouetted against a bright color background, with the white iPod and earphones being visible. The ads were everywhere; on billboards, in magazines, on TV, painted on trains and buildings. Quickly, people came to realize that if you were wearing white headphones, you had an iPod and you were a cool person!
Generations
There were a lot of iPod models, with each model going through at least two or three generations. I won’t go through each of the models and generations — instead, here’s a link to a Wikipedia page showing the features of each type of iPod ever made.
Beyond the Music: Doing More With Your iPod
For a lot of my life, I have been a writer. Back in 1986, I began writing “online” when I ran a Bulletin Board System for Mac and Apple IIGS users, but other than some scholarly papers, I hadn’t published a book. That changed in 2005 when I decided to write a book I called “Beyond the Music: Doing More with your iPod”. It was rather popular, and I ended up pitching the book to Take Control Books, which at the time was run by TidBITS publishers Adam and Tonya Engst.
My book never made the best-seller list, but it was a popular iPod reference in 2007
After some editing work and a title change, the book was sold for a time by Take Control Books both in ebook and printed formats (see image above). I also wrote a number of other ebooks for Take Control, then began writing for other publishers as well. Although I was running some personal websites at the time, those writing gigs also jump-started my online writing career at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW.com), which was absorbed by sister site Engadget in 2015.
So, what was the book about? While most people were using iPods just for listening to music, Apple had been adding some features to the iPod operating system. I told people how to use the “Personal Digital Assistant” (PDA) features on the iPod, including the calendar and to-do lists, the contact list, the clock — with a sleep timer and alarm clock, as well as a world clock and stopwatch for more advanced iPods — and a voice recorder (with a third-party microphone).
Since the iPod was essentially a hard disk drive with a fast (for the time) FireWire or USB connection, I showed people how to use their music player as a backup drive. The iPod could also be used as an emergency startup drive for a Mac.
Still not enough uses for an iPod? I got into reading RSS feeds and email on the device, as well as text documents, driving directions, text-based ebooks, Word files, Excel files, PDFs, and more.
The Legacy of the iPod
The iPod was largely responsible for the Phoenix-like rise of Apple from the ashes of the 1990s. Many people were introduced to the company’s products when they bought an iPod and liked what they saw — a product that was well-designed and constructed.
By the time the iPhone arrived on the scene in 2007, consumers were equating Apple with good quality products and with music. iTunes had expanded from a Mac-only product to one that also ran on Windows, and when the iTunes Store appeared in April of 2003, it revolutionized the sale of online media that has now culminated in the App Stores and Apple Music.
Genesis of the iPod
Like many Apple products, the iPod wasn’t the first product of its type to market, but it quickly dominated the market. Digital music players were a logical outgrowth of the Sony Walkman cassette player, which was a compact, battery-powered cassette tape player that came with a pair of wired headphones. While the Walkman and its competitors could simply play one album at a time, digital music players used either flash RAM or a small hard disk to store many songs. All of the devices needed to be connected to a computer (PC or Mac) to download music.
The first digital music players I remember were the Diamond Rio (1998, with 32MB of storage) and the Creative Labs NOMAD Jukebox (2000, with a 6GB microdrive). I resisted the temptation of buying the Diamond Rio, but when the NOMAD appeared, I just had to get one (see photo below).
A Creative Labs NOMAD Jukebox, the dismal state-of-the-art in digital music players a year before the iPod appeared
Frankly, it was horrible. In the first place, it wasn’t Mac-compatible, so I had to use a Windows machine to rip CDs and move the music to the NOMAD Jukebox. Even worse was the built-in user interface. By 2000, I had been using graphical user interfaces for 16 years (with the Mac and Windows), and I honestly think that the NOMAD’s UI was one of the worst I’ve ever seen. I recall accidentally erasing songs when I was trying to play them, frequently erasing full albums!
Apple had discontinued the Newton MessagePad by the time work began on the iPod; the Newton platform was never used as a music player. Seeing public interest in personal media players like the Walkman and the first digital devices, Steve Jobs ordered his hardware engineering chief Jon Rubenstein to build a team to design a product.
The first Apple media player design came together quickly. With engineers like Tony Fadell and Michael Dhuey working on the electronics, and Apple legend Jony Ive working on the design, the team was able to get the product to market within a year.
It helped that Rubenstein had seen a tiny Toshiba hard drive that would be perfect for a digital music player, and he purchased the rights to the drive for Apple. He had also envisioned how the screen, battery, and other components would work together.
The 1958 Braun T3 Transistor Radio, with a design that foreshadowed the first iPod “Classic”
Jony Ive had a relatively easy task. The external design of the first iPod borrowed heavily from the Braun T3 transistor radio designed by Dieter Rams in 1958 (see image above), and the “wheel” used to navigate the iPod user interface was based on the wheel control on the Bang & Olufsen BeoCom 1 cordless phone (image below). Unsurprisingly, Jony Ive counts Rams as a leading influence on his design sensibilities.
The first iPod borrowed the mechanical wheel control design on the Bang & Olufsen Beocom 1 cordless phone
The first iPod
The first iPod model was released on October 23, 2001. It was Mac-only to begin with; Jobs rightly assumed that people would be so enthralled with the iPod that they would purchase Macs in order to load them up with music. That first device had a 5GB hard drive built-in that was touted to “put 1,000 songs in your pocket”, and came with the now-iconic white earbuds that were featured in the famous silhouette ads (see example below).
The initial ads featured a dancing actor, but when people referred to him as an “iClod”, advertising agency Chiat/Day came up with the idea of using dancers silhouetted against a bright color background, with the white iPod and earphones being visible. The ads were everywhere; on billboards, in magazines, on TV, painted on trains and buildings. Quickly, people came to realize that if you were wearing white headphones, you had an iPod and you were a cool person!
Generations
There were a lot of iPod models, with each model going through at least two or three generations. I won’t go through each of the models and generations — instead, here’s a link to a Wikipedia page showing the features of each type of iPod ever made.
Beyond the Music: Doing More With Your iPod
For a lot of my life, I have been a writer. Back in 1986, I began writing “online” when I ran a Bulletin Board System for Mac and Apple IIGS users, but other than some scholarly papers, I hadn’t published a book. That changed in 2005 when I decided to write a book I called “Beyond the Music: Doing More with your iPod”. It was rather popular, and I ended up pitching the book to Take Control Books, which at the time was run by TidBITS publishers Adam and Tonya Engst.
My book never made the best-seller list, but it was a popular iPod reference in 2007
After some editing work and a title change, the book was sold for a time by Take Control Books both in ebook and printed formats (see image above). I also wrote a number of other ebooks for Take Control, then began writing for other publishers as well. Although I was running some personal websites at the time, those writing gigs also jump-started my online writing career at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW.com), which was absorbed by sister site Engadget in 2015.
So, what was the book about? While most people were using iPods just for listening to music, Apple had been adding some features to the iPod operating system. I told people how to use the “Personal Digital Assistant” (PDA) features on the iPod, including the calendar and to-do lists, the contact list, the clock — with a sleep timer and alarm clock, as well as a world clock and stopwatch for more advanced iPods — and a voice recorder (with a third-party microphone).
Since the iPod was essentially a hard disk drive with a fast (for the time) FireWire or USB connection, I showed people how to use their music player as a backup drive. The iPod could also be used as an emergency startup drive for a Mac.
Still not enough uses for an iPod? I got into reading RSS feeds and email on the device, as well as text documents, driving directions, text-based ebooks, Word files, Excel files, PDFs, and more.
The Legacy of the iPod
The iPod was largely responsible for the Phoenix-like rise of Apple from the ashes of the 1990s. Many people were introduced to the company’s products when they bought an iPod and liked what they saw — a product that was well-designed and constructed.
By the time the iPhone arrived on the scene in 2007, consumers were equating Apple with good quality products and with music. iTunes had expanded from a Mac-only product to one that also ran on Windows, and when the iTunes Store appeared in April of 2003, it revolutionized the sale of online media that has now culminated in the App Stores and Apple Music.
