Happy birthday to the iPod – 5 years old today!

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23 Oct 06 01:50 by Crabbyappleton in category Uncategorized To news archive

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Who da thunk it? Five years ago today, the venerable 4GB iPod debuted at $250 dollars a pop. That particular model, could hold about 1,000 tunes and was about the size of a deck of cards. You can take a look at it here, courtesy of the wayback machine.

But really, the iPod didn’t make it to the mainstream until 2003. By then, the online (legal) distribution of music paradigm, needed to help finance the product, was emerging as well. What a risk to try and market a device that relied heavily upon a concept, that people would pay for music downloads. Most of us at the time, probably figured this little gadget to be just a toy for a niche market. But, if you were to pick one up at a store, in literally seconds, you were navigating the file structure of the device with it’s slick, tactile pleasing, ring button pad and snappy GUI interface! Apple definately was on to something with this music player.

Prior to the iPod, Apple was merely a struggling wallflower in the world of the Microsoft dominated PC business. With the help of the iPod, Apple is now a real player and a household name again. The iPod name has become so linked with portable music, many people use the product name (annoyingly) regardless of who manufactures their particular device. Apple’s annual sales have soared in five years to nearly $14 billion, and last fiscal year it posted a nearly $2 billion profit. Not too bad!

Not all of that is due to the iPod of course. But some 55 percent of the growth in the company’s sales over the last five years has come from music player.

More than that, the iPod’s success seems to be helping sales of Macintosh computers, whose growth is outpacing the broader PC market.

“The iPod was essential to the company’s success,” said Steve Wallman, a hedge fund manager in Madison, Wis., who owns Apple’s stock. “It’s the experience that got people to reconsider Apple.”

But the iPod phenomenon is about more than just Apple’s recovery. It’s also been an instrumental part of the move toward digital distribution of music and movies and other entertainment content.

Apple iPod owners and even the people that own other types of portable media players have proven that folks are ready to cut the tether to a physical product and are just happy as clams with a protected digital file. Not only that, we may want a big screen in our living room, but we can be quite satisfied watching our favorite shows on a tiny LCD screen, as long as it rests in the palm of our hand. Not only that, we will pay a couple bucks for the privilege, as long as it’s ad free. Even though that very program we just paid for, was on television the night before for free!

Steve Jobs and company should be congratulated for coming up with such a well designed, universally enjoyed product. They also “invented” a very popular online store and community, to market goods for the player. Rolling from technical designers and software engineers, to sales. They had to wear many hats, in order to strike deals with the reluctant music and entertainment industries, to provide the content they needed so badly for their customers. Apple even had to create the wrapper for the all digital content, to protect it. This whole production and marketing concept from start to finish, took tremendous vision, skill and a lot of guts.

Happy Birthaday iPod!

Source: Mercury News

8 Comments

Ivanhoe: Posts: 751; Posted on: 23 Oct 06 13:22

Who cares about this useless ****** piece of s**t. Happy birthday my a**.

HomerJSimpsons: Posts: 144; Posted on: 23 Oct 06 14:27

I can see in the next 5 years, Zune will slowly eating into Ipod's dominant market share, unless Ipod Video's screen size is increased from the current small 2 1/2 inches to something at lease 3 1/2 inches. If Apple takes my advice, all AAPL shareholders should thank me, HomerJSimpsons for seeing this early.

Roj: Posts: 434; Posted on: 23 Oct 06 19:50

5 years... ...and they still sound like crap (a few days ago, a colleage at the office returned his brand spanking nnew G5 the same day he heard my X5). I know that most consumers will never even realise that there are higher quality solutions out there for less money so those of us who researched and bought them will continue to chuckle every time we see those telltate white headphones signifying... "Lemming Inside"

petal666: Posts: 12; Posted on: 24 Oct 06 00:27

I think that you will find it was 5GB and $399.

HomerJSimpsons: Posts: 144; Posted on: 24 Oct 06 01:58

To improve the sound, Apple should work with Dolby, DTS and Creative Lab to create a virtual multichannel sound for the headphone. I believe Dolby has a similar technology now. All Apple needs to do is license it from Dolby and has Creative Lab design the ASIC. Bigger screeen and better sound, let's see who get there first. I hope it is AAPL.

Roj: Posts: 434; Posted on: 24 Oct 06 13:38

Work with Creative Labs to improve sound quality???? You MUST be kidding. That's equivalent to having Charlie Manson as your male nurse. To improve sound quality, Apple should contract out to a company that knows how to design audio electronics and employ decent DACs to their best advantage (Apple shouldn't touch the project themselves - they obviously cannot spell the "A" in audio, Stereophile BS to the contrary). That's only the first half of the solution. Then they should scour open source land for decent implementations of audio codecs and scale them down into their firmware without losing quality. The Koreans have done it extremely well with the iAudio and iRiver products. Creative Labs? YEAH, RIGHT. NONE of that is likely to happen which is why the iPod sound will remai... ...CRAP. Virtual multichannel sound? Get over that golly-gee-whiz fad.

HomerJSimpsons: Posts: 144; Posted on: 24 Oct 06 17:14

What is in your PC now, a cheap sound card or Creative Lab! What is in most people's pocket, a cheapo korean iAudio, iRiver or a gorgeous iPod. Who is copying who? Notice the i's, who started that. If you have more than 2 ears, then we don't need the virtual stuff.

draconus: Posts: 21; Posted on: 25 Oct 06 06:41

people can bitch all they want. It doesn't change the fact that the iPod revolutionized the idea of portability with our music. Yeah there was the creative nomad which started the idea but it wasn't exactly easy to take along. But of course with anything thats 'popular', there are always going to be haters. If you don't like it, don't buy it! Get a creative Zen, or the upcoming MS Zune. Me i like the iPod and just bought myself a nicely used 4G 20GB iPod for only $100

. Apple has a good idea going and the day will come when another will take over. And then they will be hated as much then as the iPod is today

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