Has it really been FIVE years since Jobs released the iPod?! Was it 4 years and 10 months ago that I used one for a whole hour, marveling at the 5 GB capacity, the sheer smallness of the iPod itself, the ease of navigation through my buddy’s collection of 120 albums worth of music?
I remember thinking can the interface to something like this really be this simple? This is great. (Has anyone really read an iPod user manual?)
That hour blew my mind. (The price would have blown my paycheck though, so I didn’t own one until the third generation came around.)
Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod on Oct. 23, 2001, saying “With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again.”
Has any CEO ever been more right than that? I’m an admitted fan of Jobs, but even Apple haters have to admit Jobs and Apple hit the bullseye with the iPod.
Almost everybody I know has an iPod now, or two, and the sales of the iPod — responsible for much of the beleaguered 
Apple’s incredible comeback — is now driving sales of the product line that predated it by almost twenty years, the Apple Macintosh.
Here’s to five more years, and ten after that.
October 26th, 2006 at 12:53 am
I also had favorable first impressions of the original iPod. I didn’t think it was too expensive for the features it offered, but like you Matt, it was much too rich for my blood. Most of my couple hundred CDs were still just that, CDs. I ripped a double handful of songs with iTunes 2.0, but I had nowhere enough music in my digital collection to ever fill up 5GB.
These days, things are a different story. I jumped on a 4G 20GB iPod after I realized how much digital music I had acquire in the time between the iPod’s introduction and early 2004. My eMusic collection alone is a hair shy of 7GB. Let alone my podcasts, ripped music, iTS (that looks really weird abbreviation, maybe Apple shouldn’t have abandoned the iTMS moniker. Who needs video anyway?), and other such random digital music files. If I were to rip all of my CDs, I would be well past the 20GB capacity of my current iPod. I’m thinking about getting a newer, smaller, and flash based iPod, but I’m patient. Maybe I’ll just play the waiting game and see how things shake out in the new few months.
As to the impact the iPod has had, I must admit, I did not see THAT coming. Reasonably popular, especially among the Mac set, sure. The current state of affairs is exponentially greater than what I had expected. To put it mildly. Sometimes, I guess Apple really does know what it is doing.
Nathan
November 13th, 2006 at 11:37 am
[…] And one last point: has MS’s Plays for Sure fiasco (Plays for Sure media does not play on Zunes) damaged the Zune marketplace even before Zune sees its release date? So will it suck? And if so, will it suck for long? Will Microsoft dial in on Apple’s five year lead? The Zune did come from the crack Xbox team, after all. […]