iPod – ‘goddess’ to create contemporary Apple

iPod Touch becomes the final name of the “iPod family” that has existed for the past 20 years, after Apple announced the end of this product line in mid-May. More than a decade living in the shadow of the iPhone, will it is difficult for users to remember and visualize the importance of the device to Apple.

There are many current Apple products that carry the “breath” of the iPod Reuters

Looking back at Apple’s history, around the 90s of the last century, the company went through difficult times and faced the risk of bankruptcy. The turning point occurred when the line of computers iMac The G3 was welcomed in the market and Apple’s revenue started to grow again. But in the general consumer electronics market, the “defective apple” has yet to make a mark.

In October 2001, CEO Steve Jobs (died 2011) introduced the iconic portable music player of the time, capable of syncing with Mac computers, storing 1,000 MP3 songs on 5 GB of memory. . While not the first portable music player on the market, commercial iPods were still coveted at the time. Thanks to this device, they can put their entire music library on their computer in their pocket and take it with them everywhere.

iPod sales really exploded a few years later when Apple continuously introduced many new models and added support for the Windows platform. In 2002, the “apple house” sold about 400,000 iPods, according to market research firm Statista. Just four years later, sales had reached 39 million devices. iPod quickly trailed Mac in terms of sales, reaching a larger customer base. Most importantly, make the Apple brand familiar to the masses as a company that makes pocket devices.

iPod sales continued to grow rapidly as 51 million units were sold in 2007. But it was also this year that Apple introduced a new player in the market, “the next big thing”. next big) at the time: the iPhone smartphone.

The influence of the iPod was so great that it eclipsed the iPhone announcements at the time. On the iPhone introduction stage, the first thing Steve Jobs said about the new smartphone was “the widescreen version of the iPod with touch control capabilities”. It’s really an appropriate comparison because the iPhone is built on the iPod models that have already been released.

When iPhone is on the market, users must sync it with iTunes (a proprietary application of Apple) to activate, install and start using. Jobs cited this feature as the key when he introduced that iPod owners already know the iPhone activation process and also have almost all the necessary data on iTunes in advance.

The late Steve Jobs joked that the iPhone was an iPod with a touch screen Apple

iPhone is a “revolution” in many ways, but it would be difficult to get this device without the iPod. On the iPhone, there is the App Store – an application store that brings a unique quality to Apple’s smartphones, although this is not the original feature on the device. When introducing the App Store in 2008, Apple had half a decade of experience in building, maintaining and developing a digital application store called iTunes Music Store (born in 2003), a “official” address for users to use. buy digital music (copyrighted) on iPod. Don’t stop at music, label started selling movies on iTunes since 2006.

Of course, it’s fair to say that the iPod isn’t to blame for everything that makes the iPhone so popular today. Users quickly adapt to the touch screen instead of using the physical control wheel. And though the iPod continued to thrive years after the iPhone, its glory days are remembered by numbers alone. The peak of iPod sales was recorded in the first quarter of 2009 with 23 million units sold, but not specifically if it was the Shuffle Gen 2, iPod Touch Gen 1, Gen 2, Nano Gen 4 or iPod Class.

The iPod never reached that number again. iPhone sales grew at a phenomenal rate while fewer and fewer people bought iPods. In 2010, the iPad (a touchscreen device planned by Apple before the iPhone concept) was released. In just two years, the fledgling tablet model surpassed the iPod sales peak. The iPod Touch is a good device for those who like an iPhone but don’t want the voice feature, but for many people, the iPad fits that need much better.

The iPod’s importance at Apple gradually faded over the next decade. In 2015, the company’s financial statements put the iPod in the “Other products” category along with Apple TV, Watch, Beats and a list of accessories labeled Apple and third parties. iPod Classic – the “mainstream descendant” of the original iPod stopped production in 2014. Then, iPod NanoShuffle bid farewell to 2017 users and finally the medium iPod Touch End of journey year 2022.

The iPod is long gone, but its legacy lives on in many of the successful Apple-branded products today. Music is still Apple’s “scorer” content, both in terms of its streaming service and the popularity of its AirPods line of headphones.