The iPod is still a baby in the technological world of portable media players. The Sony Walkman Radio was the fist to hit the scene in the last 70s, followed by the Sony Walkman Cassette Player in the 80s and the CD Discman in the 90s. The MP3 player was the next invention and it’s no wonder that Apple came up with its famous product in an attempt to keep up with the market.
The first iPod was introduced to the world on October 23, 2001 in an attempt to streamline the very ‘clunky and awkward’ or ‘small and useless’ digital music players that were on the market. These original MP3 players were not user friendly and the company decided that they needed to offer the public something that was. CEO Steve Jobs, and hardware engineering chief John Rubinstein put their head together with their engineering departments and within one year, the iPod was introduced to the general public.
Initially the iPod was a Mac-compatible product with a 5GB hard drive. In 2001, 5GBs was a lot of room. Eventually Apple realized the need to make it Windows compatible as well and by the second generation of the classic iPod, both Windows and Mac users were able to download songs from their computer onto this small portable music player. Both systems must use a specially designed program in order to play their music, which is why people who have iPods have to use the iTunes computer software.
By 2007, the iPod user interface had been changed and updated for better performance of the device in the hands of the user. They now came with colored LCD displays, larger memory, and brightly colored outer casings. 2007 saw the introduction of the sixth-generation iPod classis, the third-generation iPod Nano, and the iPhone. The iPod Mini was replaced by the iPod Nano, and the iPod Shuffle and iPod Touch are the latest in the line of portable digital music players.
iPod Classic models still save all of its music, photo and video files on an internal hard drive while the other iPod versions use a flash memory card for storage. All of the files need to be transferred onto the iPods using the jukebox application iTunes. This program plays, burns, and rips music from a compact disk into a format that can be read by the proprietary software loaded on the iPods.
September of 2007 marked a milestone for the iPod as it had sold a lifetime amount of 150 million units internationally, making it the best-selling product of its type in history.
