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A Brief History of the iPod

Posted by michael on from the sing-me-a-song dept.

antdude writes "MacSlash mentioned MLAgazine's article on a brief history of the iPod. It all started on October 23, 2001 with the release of one of the most important products from Apple in its history."

15 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Apple's core... by mac666er · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Since its inception, Apple has always been willing to gamble more with new products than most other companies

    Granted, they flopped with the Newton... but they came out with the mac, the powerbook, peer2peer file sharing out of the box, the trackpad, the powerbook duo, speech recognition integrated on the OS on the 90's, quicktime, and the list goes on... (I would like to give them the mouse and the interface, but as with everything they also have a dark side)

    It is good to see they are ripping the benefits of believing in something completely new... ( As they believed in a portable media player by some bogus guy who was rejected by other companies)

    Kudos to Apple

    1. Re:Apple's core... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Because it costs to be the innovator?

      Apple spends far more on their backend research than the others...there might have been other HD MP3 players before the iPod, and I tried several of them before buying an iPod (the closest thing I found that I was happy with was a walkman cd style player that played just like a cd player and was the same form factor as the one I had before that which only played cds...it was still klunky).

      No, they spend far more getting this stuff perfect...other players are designed by geeks that think a feature list is what sells, when folks are buying a product because it does simply what they claim it does and does it well. I've used a few others since getting my first generation iPod...as a musician, I get a lot of these for free. Its amazing what simply asking for one of these gets you. I'm still on my first gen iPod and it is still better than the others.

      If you are one of those ones that wants more space and doesn't care about it being intuitive -- go for it. Its the same reason a lot of geeks use Linux. Its not intuitive in the slightest. I've used unix for 15 years now...probably much longer than the majority of the linux enthusiasts around here have used computers. I can understand that some folks want features over intuitiveness but most don't...This is why Windows 'outsells' Linux each and every year. Its also why the snobs of the computer world go with Mac...because its even more intuitive. Personally, I don't give a fuck about the styling of the iPod, but it does help that women like it. I use it because its the simplest interface out there and with one hand I can get to the music I want, while on my bike (motor or mountain...yeah, I know its illegal on the first), or while driving. I wish my cell phone was as intuitive and there is no reason its not.

      So why is it more expensive? Because some people are willing to pay for ease of use and having a device that thinks the way we do...

    2. Re:Apple's core... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      (I would like to give them the mouse and the interface, but as with everything they also have a dark side)

      You are right but wrong.

      Sure, the mouse credit goes to Englebart.

      But GUI is a tougher issue. While PARC had the Alto and Star, Jef Raskin (who created Macintosh and contributed Mac's GUI to Lisa too) published on similar ergonomical interfaces long before PARC was founded. Certainly Apple didn't just rip it off the Xerox guys -- Raskin had a lot of original invention in Mac's GUI.

      But there's a different dark side to it, though: Jobs brutally smoked Raskin out of Apple, out of jealosy. (When Lisa guys told Jobs to stay the fuck away from their real work, Jobs turned to the Mac project, tried to kill it a couple times, eventually got convinced by Raskin that GUI is something good, they visited PARC, Jobs took over the Mac project from Raskin, and made the CLI-only Lisa flagship adopt the GUI too, and eventually Raskin was offered a "promotion" writing brochures and designing other support material... He got the message and quit.)

      (BTW, check out "The Humane Environment" at jefraskin.com to see where he moved from the pure GUI paradigm. It's kinda interesting. More than just a "zooming interface" -- would be a killer on top of the "network native" Plan 9! And the darker sides above emerge abundantly by a simple googling on "Jef Raskin", if anybody's interested.)

    3. Re:Apple's core... by fermion · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Apple's big thing is the packaging of the hardware and software. It tends to be straightforward with much less game playing than is typical. This allows some really cool things to happen really easily. the innovation is in the access as much as the technology.

      On the matter of speech, not speech recognition, we have talking moose. if you haven't hear of it, look it up. This, and the trivial way that system level icons could be replaced, kind of a proto-skinning, made that mac a much more personal experience that any prior computer. And the desk accessories, instead of the TSR, made it much more usable.

      We see this all the way back to the Apple ][. When I first starting programming the Apple at school, this is after we learned to program on the DEC PDP, it took me like an hour to learn shape table and do some rather cool things. The elegance, at least to the teen aged mind, was astounding.

      What apple was not good at was integration. This is the big problem they have fixed with the iPod and iLife in general. The fact that we can now synch to bluetooth phones is a feature they would not have made a front issue 10 years ago. This is why the newton failed. I had to go to a Palm to do my work. If the sync for the Newton worked as well as iSync, I might still be using it today. Last I check, it worked perfectly.

      --
      "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
  2. How do you rate important? by joeykiller · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I know this is off topic, but I see they call the iPod one of the most important products in Apple history. How does one value their individual products, and how would a list of importantness lokk like? Like this?

    1. Apple I for starting the whole thing?
    2. Apple II for making Apple a business?
    3. Macintosh for paving the way to the future?
    4. iMac for saving the company?
    5. iPod for attracting buyers outside of the crowd of believers?

    Can Steve Jobs be called a "product" these days, and thus earn a place on the top 5?

  3. A great history... by jmcmunn · · Score: 1, Interesting


    I didn't know a lot about the history of the iPod, so this was quite interesting to me. I really only started paying attention to the iPod when it was compatible with the PC.

    But it would be more interesting to me to see an entire history of the Mp3 player...starting with the first little 32MB ones or whatever came out first, and going right up to the 80GB+ ones we have today. I remember being so excited when I got my first Rio Mp3 flash player. It had 64mb built in, and this was just amazing to me. I loved that thing to death. Now I look back and wonder how it was ever ok to only be able to carry a single album encoded at 128kbps around with me. :-)

    Anyone have any links to articles that might have a more broad history of the MP3 player in general?

  4. it's in the new MoMA... by mojoNYC · · Score: 4, Interesting
    my wife and I (both iPod and Mac owners) attended the opening of the new Museum of Modern Art here in NYC, and were happy to see that the original iPod (along with a G4 iBook) made it into the museum's design collection, next to other icons of product design.

    didn't see any Rios or Dell laptops, though--go figure;>

  5. Re:I remember the launch... by Mr_Silver · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I also talked with a Mac-enthusiatic buddy of mine, and he hated it. I don't know why, but he thought it would bring down Apple another notch on the finance scale. Guess he was wrong. Along with some that said "no wireless. Lame."

    That would be Taco then.

    Look how well Creative are doing too. From being the first with a HD based MP3 device to playing catch up. Oh and trying to make their products look as similar as possible to Apple's.

    Probably not quite the direction they were hoping for.

    --
    Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
  6. Re:Intriguing idea by zerman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Maybe they don't lose money, but the iPod is certainly a bigger cashcow, so why not pour R&D into that instead?

  7. Re:Intriguing idea by finkployd · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you were just talking desktops, I kinda agree. Laptops on the other hand, I feel there are simply no x86 based laptops that can compete with the powerbook line on price, performance, features, etc. I have noticed the powerbooks line (and to a much lesser extent, the ibook line) making a massive comeback in higher education.
    Whereas I would used to go to various conferences and see over 90% thinkpads and some dells, now is seems well over half the people attending have powerbooks, and that number just keeps growing.

    Granted higher ed is a small subset of the population, but I have been noticing more apple laptops in other groups as well.

    Finkployd

  8. Re:I remember the launch... by Mant · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's funny to read that old thread, all the people prediciting how it wouldn't succeed.

    Good thing nobody takes business advice from Slashdot.

  9. Re:I think I can hear... by Sabah+Arif · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm the webmaster there. Does anyone have a mirror site that we can host the images off? My server is my home machine, a PII 266.

  10. Not To Anger the Mod Gods, But... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    ... has anyone else noticed that Slashdot is just overflowing with worshipful fluff articles about Apple products recently (like the last year or two?) I can't help but think that Apple has paid Taco's Corporate Masters for the "inline advertising" that Slashdot used to decry as unethical. Microsoft has banner ads at the top, Apple gets a positive spin story or two a day.

    *** Posting anonymously because whenever I say something negative about Apple when I'm logged in, the mods go straight to my account and mod down every other post I've made in the last few days as revenge.

  11. And here are the precursors by Bj�rn+Stenberg · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Since so many people are confused/misled about who invented what regarding harddisk mp3 players, I created this simple history page:

    http://www.rockbox.org/playerhistory/

    It may surprise some people to see that the iPod was announced a full two years after the first harddisk-based mp3 player.

  12. Re:One of the most important? by the+pickle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Important to Apple, or important to the world?

    I submit that the iPod will be the latter, and without having RTFA, suspect this is the direction the authors were going.

    Why, you ask?

    The iPod could be the device that eventually breaks Microsoft's stranglehold on the computer industry. The important point here isn't that the iPod has been fantastically profitable to Apple. It has, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that the iPod has done more for Apple's "mind-share" than anything since the famous "1984" advertisement. The results of the recent study indicating that some 13% of iPod customers are already (or are planning to become) Macintosh owners are nothing less than spectacular. If Apple can play this advantage into greater Macintosh market share -- even as little as 10-15 percent, compared to less than five percent right now -- several things will happen:

    1) You can get away with excluding two or three percent of your user base. You cannot get away with excluding ten percent of it. This will force companies to design Web sites that work on ALL computers, not just the latest Windows box.

    2) Two to three percent of people can be dismissed as the lunatic fringe. It's a lot harder to dismiss ten percent as the lunatic fringe. Thus, the Macintosh becomes more of a mainstream platform, and PHBs start realising that there's an alternative to Windows for the corporate world.

    3) In conjunction with #1, software developers now have a much larger potential market, encouraging them to bring quality products to the Macintosh where none previously existed. The lack of specialty software is the ONLY thing keeping a large number of my friends from switching to a Macintosh.

    Should this come to pass, it's unlikely that history will remember the iPod as the catalyst, mostly because the Macintosh and Apple I were directly significant to the computer industry, whereas the iPod itself isn't a particularly revolutionary device. Of course, history hasn't remembered a lot of things as they should have been.

    p

    --
    In Korea, long hair is for old people!