92 MACWORLD DECEMBER 2021
PLAYLIST HOW THE i POD PAVED THE WAY FOR APPLE’S SUCCESSRoughly two months into my senior year of
college, I was sitting in Uris Library’s “Fish
Bowl” (fave.co/3wb5Cfu), in front of my
PowerBook G3, poring over all the details
of this strange new brick on Apple’s
webpage and various news sites. (There
were no event livestreams in those days,
nor was there social media on which to get
your hot takes—like this well-aged classic
[fave.co/3EE2SdE].)
A music player seemed like a strange
move for Apple, a company that until that
point had been focused on the personal
computer as its main hardware product. It
was the heyday of the MP3, traded illicitly
over the internet via a succession of apps
The iPod gave birth to a family of music players, including several
incarnations of the iPod nano.
like Napster, LimeWire, and Kazaa. Two
more years would go by before the iTunes
Store ushered in an era of legit digital
music purchases; at the time, the vast
majority of music in people’s collections
were either ripped from CDs or pirated
(and sometimes both).
Most of the MP3 players that predated
the iPod depended on memory cards that
could hold at best a handful of songs. A
couple of years before the iPod’s release, I
had to regularly park my car across
campus from my dorm, and I would borrow
my roommate’s Diamond Rio with 32MB of
storage—just enough music to accompany
my mile and a half walk.
But the iPod could, famously, hold a
thousand songs on its 5GB hard drive.
While there were other digital music
players using hard drives at the time,
what ended up setting the iPod apart
were its intuitive wheel interface and
Apple’s trademark ease of use.
At $399, the iPod followed
Apple’s well-established
practice, even at that time, of
not being the cheapest
product around. But, like
more than a few Apple
gadgets, the iPod
quickly became the
“it” gadget of the
day—especially after
adding Windows