iPod

One of the fun things about looking through history is the realization of how close some events were to one another. It certainly makes sense that the Potsdam Resolution, the delivery of Little Boy to Tinian and the departure of Fat Man from New Mexico would have all happened on the same day - some coordination would have been desirable, after all. Looking at what happens and realizing that they were so nearly simultaneous, though, gives a reality to them all.

The original iPod was released on October 23, 2001. That means it was barely a month after the September 11 attacks, a few weeks after the invasion of Afghanistan, two weeks after two anthrax letters had been mailed to senators in Washington D.C. The launch of a new Apple product was not the main topic on everyone's mind.

For that matter, Apple was not followed quite the way it is today. Steve Jobs had returned four years earlier, and most of his actions had been about keeping the company alive and focused on areas where it could succeed. The iMac had been a very successful Mac model, which still wasn't saying a lot. The use of the "i" prefix indicated that the iPod was a next step down the same road - possibly the one Steve Jobs alluded to in a 1995 interview, when he said he had a way to rescue Apple.

"Lame" was one famous response. There were others, though, that thought it was going to be an exceptional product. Even if it was expensive ($400), not that large (5GB), limited in use (a music player only), and inherently a niche product (only worked with Macs with Firewire and then-new iTunes), the ability to easily carry and play a music library was going to be big. And it was. The iPod was profitable, popular, and a starting point for the Apple "ecosystem" that ties people to their music libraries, their libraries to their devices, and their devices to each other.  All of which lead to Apple becoming one of the largest companies (by market cap) ever.

Nothing lasts forever, though. When Apple updated their website and online store as part of the big iPhone 6 / Apple Watch announcements today, the original iPod design went away. The iPod Touch and Shuffle and Nano are still available, but the iPod Classic - which had up to 160GB of space in its latest iteration - is no more.