What you need to know
- Apple's iPod turns 20 today.
- Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPod on October 23, 2001.
- At the time he said "With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again."
Today marks the 20 year anniversary of Apple's iPod, announced by Steve Jobs on October 23, 2001.
At a small event in 2001, Apple's co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs told an audience that Apple had "invented a whole new category of digital music player that lets you put your entire music collection in your pocket and listen to it wherever you go", claiming that "With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again."
Apple's first iPod let you store 1,000 CD-quality songs on its 5GB hard drive, transferred using a built-in FireWire port. Transferring 1,000 songs took "less than 10-minutes", and Apple boasted 20 minutes of shock protection for the hard drive so that you could use the iPod while running, biking, or exercising.
The first iPod had a 160 x 128 pixel "high-resolution" (yeah, we know) display with an LED backlight. The iPod cost $399 when it was released on November 10, and came with an iTunes 2 CD, earbuds, and the power adapter. The first iPod also brought with it Apple's iconic click wheel, at the time the company described it as the "easiest to use digital device ever." Here's a snippet from the original press release:
The scroll-wheel makes it possible to hold and operate iPod with just one hand and features automatic acceleration when scrolling through long lists so you can find your music in seconds. iPod also features customizable settings such as shuffle, repeat, startup volume, sleep timer and menus in multiple languages including English, French, German and Japanese. iPod can display song data in any of these languages, enabling users to mix and match songs from all over the world.
You can see the first iPod Commercial below:
