Swan song of a game changer
The defining device of the portable music era is now headed for history, as Apple stops ipod sales
Apple announced unexpectedly strong sales of its iphone last week, but also said it would kill off the music device that made it all possible: the ipod. The renamed ipod Classic was discontinued in 2014, and last week it was the turn of the smaller ipod Nano and Shuffle to be dropped from
Apple’s online store. They were the last of the music players that made Apple into the mobile titan it is today.
When it was released in 2001, the ipod was a game changer. It transformed music consumption and started the process of combining our separate gadget needs into one device.
Apple allowed us to rip our music to digital format (the good old MP3) and then transfer it to an ipod to transport around with us. Steve Jobs proclaimed that the ipod put “1,000 songs in your pocket”. The language originally used sought to describe it as the size of a pack of cigarettes.
Just 16 years ago cigarettes were still being mentioned in favourable terms and music was something that you copied onto a portable device, long before streaming became the platform du jour.
Early ipods solved the problem of navigating with a simple and efficient scroll-wheel design. This alone was design genius. It was elegant and easy to use. It defined how we navigated our portable music back then, long before the thumb-scrolling of the iphone and swipe-right of today.
Not long after that first ipod was released, Apple brought us an ipod Mini, which also had the tiny hard drives used in laptops. The Nano replaced the Mini in 2005 and was the first flash-based version of the music player. It was one of the greatest examples of Jobs’s famous axiom: “If you don’t cannibalise yourself, someone else will.”
At the time, the Mini was the most successful MP3 player the world had ever seen and demonstrated Jobs’s ruthless sense of innovation. The Nano was even tinier, and would introduce the ability to store photographs and contact details, the first rudimentary vestiges of the personal information management systems that would evolve into the digital assistant we know as the iphone.
The Shuffle was another unexpected success, a tiny device with no screen that shuffled the music loaded on it. It was one of Apple’s few attempts at a cheaper, entry-level device. However, both the Nano and the Shuffle, which were last updated in 2012 and 2010 respectively, were from the pre-smartphone era, before apps. They were from a time when you ripped and converted your CD collection. Now streaming music is the new normal and old-school non-app ipods are just passé. This has been especially true since Apple went into the streaming business when it bought Beats Music in 2014 for Us$3bn and introduced Apple Music in 2015.
Apple’s invitation for the original ipod launch called the event “the unveiling of a breakthrough device”. The pre-hype was right. RIP, ipod.
The ipod Nano is an example of Steve Jobs’s famous axiom: ‘If you don’t cannibalise yourself, someone else will’