Apple at 50: The iPod Mattered More Than the iPhone

I still remember the first time I heard an MP3 file. It was back in 1995, right after I graduated from college. It was some proto drum-and-bass track that I had downloaded to my PC from an FTP site, back when the web was just beginning to go mainstream. I don’t remember the name of the song or the artist. But I do remember being stunned by how clear it sounded. It was a full four-minute digital audio file that, at just a couple of megabytes, was also small enough to download in a few minutes over a dial-up connection.

Today, with the exception of a growing band of vinyl enthusiasts, almost everyone listens to digital music. The single biggest reason for that is Apple's iconic iPod. Almost overnight, the iPod was everywhere in the aughts. There were giant billboard ads and flashy TV commercials. People around the globe rocked out with Apple's famous white earbuds.

In 2022, Apple discontinued the iPod after 20 years. Today, as we look back at all things Apple for the company's 50th anniversary, it seems fitting to reflect on the iPod's origins and how it utterly changed the way we listen to music today.

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Apple Took Its Time

A flurry of little-known startups released the first batch of MP3 players in the late 1990s. They were cramped by current standards, with just 32MB or 64MB of internal memory—enough for an album or two’s worth of music, or a decent mixtape. Ripping your music to digital files offered advantages over CDs and MiniDiscs—they didn't skip, and you could rearrange them however you like.

But it was the rise of illegal file-sharing on Napster, Kazaa, and other peer-to-peer services that cemented the MP3 as the new format of choice. And as the market for MP3 players expanded, Creative Labs, Samsung, and other familiar names entered the fray.

An Apple iBook and iPod circa 2001 (Photo: Apple Corp. via Getty Images)

True to form, Apple watched the market for a couple of years. Then Steve Jobs announced the sleek new iPod on Oct. 23, 2001, a hard left turn for a company still mostly known for its Macintosh (including the colorful new iMac line) and a giant faceplant in the handheld PDA market.

The iPod was remarkably expensive at $399 and only worked with Macs. But it also had an impressively roomy 5GB 1.8-inch hard drive. This meant that instead of 10 or 20 songs, it could put 1,000 songs in your pocket, as the original ad went—no other MP3 player at the time came close. That was a good portion of the average music lover's CD collection, and certainly more than a zippered case full of cassettes.

With the iPod, you still had to rip all your CDs to your computer using Apple's iTunes software. But it meant you could listen to any of your favorite songs on a whim. Here's our review of the first iPod, which we published online on Nov. 7, 2001, and in the Dec. 26, 2001 issue of PC Magazine:

(PCMag)

Apple continued to refine the iPod over the next couple of years, introducing Windows compatibility (a huge step) and the brilliant Click Wheel design. The company also began lowering the price and offering new versions that were smaller, had color screens that could play video, or were loaded with increasingly capacious hard drives.

Steve Jobs introducing new iPods in 2005 (Photo: Kimberly White/Corbis via Getty Images)

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The Advent of Buying Digital Music

The other big piece of the puzzle was Apple’s 2003 introduction of the iTunes Music Store, which changed the music industry overnight. It meant you could buy a 99-cent single instead of an entire album, many of which normally cost $15 to $18 and only had one or two good songs anyway.

This decision—and the behind-the-scenes scramble and hard work to get all the extremely reluctant major record labels on board—was key to launching the iPod into the stratosphere. Customers finally had an easy way to buy music legally. Much more than even the iMac, the iPod reversed Apple's decline and sent the company's fortunes skyrocketing.

Within a few years, people went from primarily buying CDs or illegally sharing music on Napster, Kazaa, and other now-defunct services to buying music online through Apple. Competing services sprang up, but for a long time, none could dent Apple's lead.

Creative Zen Micro MP3 Players at CES 2005 in Las Vegas (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

I spent the mid-2000s reviewing various MP3 players for tech magazines, including models from Archos, Cowon, Creative, iRiver, Sony, and Toshiba. Many were quite good, but were usually let down by their buggy third-party software or by Microsoft Windows Media Player and its clumsy DRM. In comparison, Apple's iTunes software worked perfectly with the iPod, even when connected to Windows PCs (for a time, at least). All you had to do was connect your iPod to your computer whenever you wanted to add new music or playlists.

In addition to transforming music playback, the phenomenon also gave rise to the podcast, on-demand episodes of programs dedicated to news, hobbies, true crime, and other popular interests. For a short time, Apple even went after some popular channels over the co-opted "pod" name, as if this would somehow hurt the company's trademark rather than help sell untold numbers of more iPods.

The iPod even found its way into cars. In 2004, BMW launched the first in-vehicle iPod integration, an innovation that other automakers quickly copied. It was a huge advance over messy cassette-tape adapters for your portable CD player, or trunk-mounted, skip-prone CD changers from the 1990s.

In tandem with the rise of the iPod, an entire market of third-party accessories cropped up: all manner of cases, aftermarket earbuds, alarm clocks, and speaker docks. Stereo systems no longer meant large racks of sleek components, or gaudy mini-systems swathed in silver plastic, with "XXXTREME BASS" in all caps plastered to the speaker grilles. Now, a stereo system could be a single speaker that was infinitely more compact and yet still fill a room with music (although it didn't sound very stereo).

Bose's SoundDock became the most popular, but JBL, Logitech, and many others made competitive models, many of which cost less. These third-party accessories all contributed to Apple's bottom line, thanks to the requisite licensing fees for the proprietary 30-pin iPod connector.

Audiophiles still preferred the sound of lossless CD rips to 128Kbps or even 256Kbps music files (thankfully, Amazon MP3 nudged Apple and the rest of the industry toward better-sounding codecs in the late 2000s). But increasingly, people moved their collections over to digital. It was just too convenient to ignore. iTunes let you organize your entire music collection on your computer and create untold numbers of playlists for moods, activities, days of the week, or whatever else you wanted. You could even sell off all your CDs.

The Logitech Pure-Fi Elite, an excellent speaker dock I reviewed in 2007

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The Rise of Streaming and Wireless Audio

Apple kept going in the late 2000s, building out the iPod nano line with flash storage after cornering the world's supply of NAND flash. Even as more people began to carry so-called smart phones like the Palm Treo and Motorola Q that could play MP3s, many consumers (including me) stuck with their iPods, which became ever smaller and continued to work with speaker docks and an increasing number of car stereos with iPod connectors.

Then the world started to pass the iPod by. Apple's increasingly bloated iTunes software was part of the reason, as Cupertino stuffed music videos, movie rentals, discovery algorithms, and even social networking into its essential music app. Lots of us bemoaned iTunes' precarious state in the reviews of the day. But the two main culprits that did in the iPod were wireless and streaming audio.

The first was easy to predict, because Apple did it to itself with the iPhone. Introduced in 2007, the iPhone did everything the iPod could and worked exactly the same way, except with a capacitive touch screen instead of the Click Wheel. Why carry two devices if you could have just one that doubles as your cellphone?

Sure, it took a few years for iPhones to pick up enough storage capacity to match hard-drive-equipped iPods, and for wireless Bluetooth speakers to catch up to iPod speaker docks in sound quality, variety, and cost. But the writing was already on the wall for wired iPods.

The Bose SoundLink Mini II, one of many Bluetooth speakers

The other culprit, streaming services, took longer to mature. Pandora and Slacker excelled at internet radio, but replacing your music library and playlists was a much tougher problem. Many early subscription-based entries (including Napster, which tried and failed to rebrand) had spotty music catalogs and prohibitive, often buggy DRM. Spotify changed all that. Why bother downloading and ripping MP3s when you could play anything you wanted at any time you wanted for a low monthly fee, and still make as many playlists as you wanted? Soon, Apple rebranded iTunes as Apple Music to catch up.

Apple Music, which the company introduced in 2015

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Sunset of the iPod

I grew up in the days of record and tape collections. CDs offered “perfect sound forever,” as was claimed on the format's 1982 introduction. (At least until they got scratched too much; then they offered “horribly skipping sound forever.”) In the past year, Spotify and Apple Music both finally caught up to Tidal and began streaming music at full CD-quality, in 16-bit, 44.1kHz lossless, although whether you're actually hearing that is a different question.

Today, streaming services give you access to everything. This has its drawbacks; for starters, it no longer feels like your music. You can still make playlists, but nothing prevents Spotify or Apple from changing the version of the song you hear, or from even pulling it entirely. I thought this would be a deal breaker, but it turns out that most people don’t care about personalized music collections (High Fidelity be damned)—it matters more that you never have to buy albums or songs ever again. And of course, it's easier to manage playlists on streaming services than bouncing files back and forth between devices and computers.

Some of us (me) also miss the blissful isolation of just listening to music, with a device that can only play music, and not also infest your afternoon with doomscrolling, notifications, or countless other interruptions that keep you from ever fully detaching, even for a few minutes. (I'm fine, really.) Interestingly, a thriving enthusiast market for used and classic iPods emerged about five years ago and seems to have accelerated recently.

Regardless, for most people, the iPod outlived its usefulness. Its demise marked a natural bookend to an amazing era of transformation, both in the music industry and in the way we all listen to music. It'll be interesting to see whether today's rekindled enthusiasm for the iPod is just a fad or something more enduring.

In the end, the iPod also transformed Apple—and led directly to the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, when Steve Jobs officially dropped the word 'computer' from his company's name.

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