This week the iPod turned ten years old. It’s principle creator, Steve Jobs, tragically missed out on the birthday of the product which set Apple on a remarkable journey from underdog alternative computer company to one of the most valuable commercial organisations on the planet.
It’s all too easy to forget, living as we do, in an age of smartphones which do such a multitude of things, that it was the iPod, a device focused on doing just one thing well – giving you access to your music on the go – that changed the whole music industry and ultimately began the transformation of the phone and computer industries’ too.
It is also hard to remember that on its introduction the iPod was a crushing disappointment to Apple fans that had heard the rumours and had waited expectantly for it. What Apple fanatics were hoping for (and what had been rumoured) was a replacement for the Newton, the flawed pen-based PDA that Steve Jobs had killed on his return to the company in 1997. Many assumed that the new device Apple planned to introduce in 2001 would be a do-everything computer in your pocket, so when Steve Jobs stood in front of a small room of journalists on Apple’s Cupertino Campus and introduced Apple’s rather expensive take on the already common and rather unsuccessful MP3 player, many thought that it was a sure-fire miss or at least a missed opportunity.
In retrospect we can see now that it was the start of a journey, the first step towards the very thing the geeks and tech journalists had hoped and expected Apple would introduce at that first iPod event.The original iPod crucially also foretold the form which that long-wished-for device would eventually take, as well as the philosophy behind it: when Apple build the iPhone, it wasn’t built to satisfy the gadget lust of geeks, but rather was built to be used by the parents and grandparents of geeks, by the children of geeks and by the friends of geeks: in other words by everyone else.
What Apple showed with the iPod was that to make a new kind of device into a mass market success – particularly a device that the majority of people didn’t know they wanted or needed – that device had to represent a transformative leap forward in doing the thing it was made for. In the case of the iPod Apple realised that it couldn’t just provide a clunky interface to play music, an inscrutable digital calendar, or a difficult to navigate email client like many of the PDA’s of the late 90’s from companies such as Palm and HP. Instead Apple focused on making the iPod do one thing brilliantly, and then they aggressively built the iTunes ecosystem around the many refinements of the device which followed. The rest, as the cliché goes, is history but it is also very much part of the future.
The iPod as a product is now fading in to irrelevance, with declining sales and market cannibalisation from smartphones and streaming music services like Spotify. But what the iPod represents is the link between the PC era and a future of devices connected to an ecosystem of content and services.
