iPod Day

What the day is

iPod Day is observed on October 23, marking the date in 2001 when Apple announced the first iPod.

Origin and background

It was not the first hard-drive music player, and the reception at launch was mixed. It cost considerably more than its competitors, worked only with Macintosh computers at first, and required a FireWire port that most people did not have. Technology forums of the period are full of confident predictions that it would fail.

What it had was a combination the competition lacked: a 5GB drive that genuinely did hold a thousand songs, a scroll wheel that made navigating that many tracks possible without a keyboard, and FireWire transfer fast enough that filling it did not take all evening. Competing players held a few dozen songs or took hours to load.

The larger change came two years later with the iTunes Store, which persuaded major labels to license individual tracks for sale at a fixed low price. That broke the album as the unit of purchase, which had been the industry's economic foundation for decades, and it offered a legal alternative at a moment when file sharing was doing severe damage to music revenues.

The iPod's own decline came from the same company. The iPhone made a separate music player redundant, and Apple was willing to destroy a highly profitable product line rather than let someone else do it. Streaming then dissolved ownership entirely, so that the idea of a device holding your music library now needs explaining to anyone under twenty-five.

How to take part

• Dig out an old one. Many still work, and replacement batteries are widely available.
• Listen to an album from start to finish, in order, which is the habit the shuffle era eroded.
• Check whether music you care about is still on your streaming service. Catalogs vanish without notice.
• Keep local copies of anything you would miss. Licensing is not ownership.
• Look at the first-generation design and notice how little of it was decoration.