Since their launch in October 2001, about 200,000,000 iPods have been sold worldwide! As these sales figures suggest, there's something special about the iPod. By far the most successful portable music device ever to hit the stores, the iPod became the definitive product of its generation "it's white bud earphones and distinctive click wheel as emblematic of youth and freedom as tie-dye and Bob Dylan was in the 1960s. This was more than just an mp3 player.

Apple Got It Wrong

The 1990s belonged to Bill Gates. While Apple's classic Macintosh computers were visible in the fledgling home computer market in the 1980s, Bill Gates' Windows operating system (3.1 and, most notably, Windows 95) stormed the Apple barricades and went on to dominate computing for a decade or more.

Most peripheral devices and most advances in software were created with Windows-equipped PCs in mind. Apple, it seemed, had missed the mainstream boat, with Macintoshes confined to design studios and desktop publishing houses. Where to now?

Apple Gets It Right - Finally

Apple CEO Steve Jobs was directly involved in the production of the iPod. Much of the development work was conducted in-house at Apple, although the much-lauded user interface was perfected by Pixo, a company run by a former Apple executive.

The launch of the iPod Classic "a 5GB hard drive model that held around 1000 songs in mp3 format - entirely revolutionised the portable music player market. Finally there was a sleek, attractive and easy-to-use mp3 player that came with its own music management software, iTunes.
iPod Innovations

iPOD CLASSIC

Over the next few years, Apple added more iPod models and more storage capacity to its iPod range. In just over 7 years, 6 generations of the iPod Classic were released, holding between 5GB and 120GB of music, files and other data.

iPOD NANO

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