How Apple iPods brought a music revolution
iPods discontinued: iPods, the most loved music listening gadget by Apple, will now become history after the tech company announced to stop its production. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, in 2001 had launched the iPod to listen to music on the go. "Music is a part of everyone's life, music has been around forever....With iPod, Apple has invented a whole new category of digital music player that lets you put your entire music collection in your pocket and listen to it wherever you go. With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again," he had said during the launch of tiny music powerhouse. For years, people did show their trust in the brand that brought a revolution to music by making it personalised and private.
Era of Walkman and Discman
Before iPods, the 90s kids will remember being hooked to the Walkmans and Discmans that were not just a medium to listen to music but it looked super cool as well. However, when the original iPod launched on October 23, 2000, it became the hottest gadget in the market. Until then, people were only able to buy cassettes and discs of individual albums, films or artists, which would get ruined after using for a short while. iPod brought an easier and more cost-effective way to enjoy music by letting users add up to 1000 songs and play in good quality. It also played songs in all of the popular open formats of digital music - mp3, mp3 variable, bitrate, WAV and AIFF. It consisted of a 10-hour battery and was compact, which attracted buyers and music lovers.
Walkman
The iPod and its family
Over the years, Apple launched many versions of Ipods to enhance user experience. In 2004, it introduced the iPod mini which was a smaller design. Then in 2006 came the iPod nano (2nd generation) consisting of a thin design, a bright colour display, six stylish colours, up to 24 hours of battery life, and put up to 2,000 songs in users' pockets.
iPod touch, first introduced in 2007, further changed the way people listened to music by launching it as a combination of the iPod, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough Internet communicator. Later, the 7th-generation iPod Touch was introduced in 2019.
The launch of the iPhone in the same year 2007 as that of the iPod touch threatened the market of this revolutionary music player and eventually superseded it. Tony Fadell, one of the developers of the original iPod, mentioned in an interview with The Verge that the iPod team knew the iPhone could end up overtaking music players. "It became very clear to us that there was a real threat from mobile phones, feature phones. They were starting to add music, MP3 playing, to the cell phones that they were shipping at the time," he said.
Now, with Apple discontinuing its production, iPod joins walkman and discman in a list of gadgets that revolutionised the way people consumed music.
