DECEMBER 2021 MACWORLD 93compatibility in 2002. And, more to the
point, its runaway success changed
Apple’s fortunes dramatically.
iPOD, YOU POD, WE ALL POD
For me, the iPod had a momentous
personal impact. My first iPod was the
first-generation model, and it changed
the way I consumed music. Like every
teenager and college student of my era,
I’d carried around a CD player and one
of those seemingly ubiquitous folios of
CDs. The pinnacle I could aspire to was
the six-disc CD changer in my friend’s
Volkswagen Jetta—a device that was so
bulky it had to live sequestered in the
car’s trunk.
But the iPod was also far and away
from Apple’s most prominent product
when I started working at
Macworld in 2006, already
five years after the device’s
release (fave.co/3EE3gsC).
I cut my teeth reviewing an
endless slew of iPod cases
and other accessories. I
walked the halls of the
Consumer Electronics
Show in the days when it
seemed like everybody
was trying to capitalize on
the iPod’s success,
prefixing all their products
with “i” or building 30-pin
dock connectors into anything that could
fit them. Those white earbuds, both
Apple’s and the not infrequent imitations,
were ubiquitous.
The iPod defined Apple in the 2000s,
and for a while it seemed as though it was
such a tremendous, world-beating product
that its success could never possibly ebb.WHAT GOES UP
In that era, it sometimes seemed like the
iPod would be the hit product in the history
of Apple, but in retrospect, its prime lasted
less than a decade. That original model
was followed by revamps and new
versions—the mini, the nano, the shuffle—
but just six years later, “a widescreen iPod
with touch controls” called the iPhone
came along and ate its lunch.Without the iPod, the iPhone might not have ever arrived.