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

Consumers looking for options with their mp3 players have been spoilt for choice, with Apple launching several other iPod models over the past years. In 2005, Apple released two flash-drive models, the iPod Nano (formerly known as the iPod Mini) and the tiny iPod Shuffle.

The iPod Nano is a mid-range iPod model, with memory ranging from 1GB to 16GB. It comes in a range of bright, metallic colours and was the first Apple music player to feature the 'accelerometer', which allows song selection to be shuffled by shaking the player.

iPOD SHUFFLE

The iPod Shuffle was another smart product launch, tapping in to research that showed that many iPod users were utilising the ‘shuffle' function to play songs in a random order. The iPod Shuffle dispenses with the trademark click wheel and other organisational functions: it plays loaded songs in a random order.

iPHONE

With the much-heralded launch of the Apple iPhone in mid-2007, the iPod device found a new home. While stand-alone models continue to be released – and continue to sell in astronomical quantities – the integrated iPhone / iPod is a compelling and phenomenally successful example of device convergence.

iPOD TOUCH

In 2007, not long after the release of the iPhone, Apple released the iPod Touch, which looks and behaves remarkably like an Apple iPhone, without the telephone capabilities.
iPod File Formats

AUDIO

Many of the most popular audio file formats are able to be played by the iPod:

• MP3
• WAV
• AIFF
• AAC/M4A
• Protected AAC
• Audible audiobook
• Apple Lossless

The Apple iPod does not play WMA files (part of Apple's ongoing decades-old rivalry with Microsoft), Windows users can convert WMA files using iTunes. Other popular open source formats like Ogg Vorbis and high-quality FLAC files also can't be played on an iPod.

PHOTOS

Photo-enabled iPods (the iPod Photo, later versions of the iPod Classic, and iPod Nano models released after 2007) can display all the major image file formats:

• JPEG
• BMP
• GIF
• TIFF
• PNG

VIDEO

From the release of the 5th generation iPod Classic in 2005, video has been able to be played on some iPod models, including the Nano. Two file formats are supported:

• MPEG-4
• QuickTime.

Not Just Music

As with other popular mp3 players on the market (such as the Creative Zen, the Sony Walkman, Microsoft's Zune, the influential iRiver range and other mp3 models), iPods are able to be used as portable storage drives; rather than music, they can store any digital data (such as documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc), enabling easy transfer between computer systems.

Despite this, though, music "and, lately, video" are still the most common uses of the iPod.