The iPod turns 25: how Apple's first music player was announced on October 23, 2001

Twenty-five years ago today, on October 23, 2001, Apple announced a small music player that nobody outside the company had seen coming as an Apple product. It was called the iPod.

A different kind of invite

Apple had invited reporters to Infinite Loop for what it described as a breakthrough digital device that was not a Mac. Speculation ahead of the event ranged from a music player to a home stereo accessory, according to MacRumors' retrospective. The product turned out to be a pocket-sized player with a 5GB hard drive, which Apple said could hold up to 1,000 songs.

What the original offered

According to Apple's press release from the time, the first iPod weighed about 6.5 ounces and used a rechargeable lithium polymer battery rated for up to 10 hours of continuous music. It had a 160 x 128 pixel display with a white LED backlight and connected over FireWire, which Apple said could move an entire CD in under 10 seconds and 1,000 songs in under 10 minutes. It handled MP3, AIFF and WAV files, and could double as a portable FireWire hard drive.

The catch was compatibility: the player required a Mac running iTunes 2, which synced music and playlists automatically. It carried a suggested price of $399 and went on sale on November 10, 2001.

Mixed first reactions

The reception was not universally warm. MacRumors notes that early commenters questioned the price, the Mac-only requirement and how significant the device would turn out to be, while early owners raised complaints about fingerprints on the polished back and about sound quality, alongside plenty of positive impressions.

From one model to a family

Over the following years the line grew quickly. The iPod mini arrived in January 2004, and the iPod shuffle and iPod nano followed in 2005. The iPod touch launched in September 2007, a few months after the first iPhone, with a 3.5-inch Multi-Touch display, Wi-Fi and Safari. Apple said it had sold more than 300 million iPods by the product's 10th anniversary in 2011, according to MacRumors.

The wind-down was gradual. The iPod classic was discontinued in September 2014, the nano and shuffle were removed in July 2017, and Apple retired the last model, the iPod touch, on May 10, 2022, saying music was by then built into its other products.

Why it still matters

The iPod's story runs straight into today's lineup: the music library, the online store and the pocketable touchscreen device all fed into what became the iPhone, and the iPhone Duo launching this week sits at the far end of that line. Whatever one thinks of the first iPod's price, the device changed what Apple was.