Tech — Noozify Original — October 23, 2026

iPod at 25: The Music Player That Rebuilt Apple Before the iPhone

By Adam Cannizzaro

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On September 1st, John Ternus became Apple's chief executive, succeeding Tim Cook after spending nearly his entire career at the company, most recently as head of hardware engineering. Ternus joined Apple's product design team in 2001, the year a struggling computer maker staked a good part of its future on a music player. Twenty-five years ago, on October 23, 2001, Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod. It is usually remembered as a gadget. It is better understood as a rehearsal. Nearly every habit that later made the iPhone possible, from cornering the supply of a scarce component to owning the store that sells whatever plays on the device, Apple learned first on the iPod.

It is easy to forget how small Apple was then. In fiscal 2001, which ended that September, its sales fell 33% to $5.36 billion, and a company that had earned $786 million the year before lost $25 million. Its plan for the recovery was the "digital hub," with the Mac at the center of a household's cameras, camcorders, and music. The first iPod worked only with Macs. It was meant to sell them.

The device existed because of a part nobody else wanted. In February 2001, on a routine visit to suppliers in Japan, Apple's head of hardware, Jon Rubinstein, was shown a prototype 1.8-inch hard drive. By IEEE Spectrum's account, Toshiba wasn't sure what to do with it. Rubinstein was. Until then, he said, Apple's "two choices" had been to "do a big clunky device or do a device that held a dozen songs." He told Jobs he knew how to build it, then told Toshiba he would buy every 1.8-inch drive the company could make. The project began in March with a Christmas deadline.

What Jobs unveiled was a 6.5-ounce player with a 5 GB hard drive, a 10-hour battery, and a $399 price, sold on the promise of 1,000 songs in your pocket. It required a Mac. On its face sat a wheel that physically turned under the thumb and, at the suggestion of the marketing chief Phil Schiller, scrolled faster the longer it turned, so that a thousand songs took a flick rather than a hundred presses of a button. It went on sale November 10th, and Apple sold more than 125,000 in the first two months.

That price was steep. By our calculation, using the government's consumer price index, $399 in October 2001 is about $757 in today's money, or about $151 for each of the iPod's 5 gigabytes. Apple's cheapest phone today, the iPhone 17e, sells for $699 with 256 gigabytes, under $3 a gigabyte. By the iPod's own math of 1,000 songs per 5 GB, that phone has room for about 51,000 songs, and it costs less than the first iPod did.

The more consequential change came in July 2002, when Apple made the iPod available "for the first time to both Mac and Windows customers." By the end of October it was in all 1,148 Target stores. A Windows iPod did nothing for Mac sales, the reason the iPod existed. It was the first sign that Apple would let a product succeed on its own, even on a rival's computers.

Then came the store. On April 28, 2003, Apple opened the iTunes Music Store with more than 200,000 songs from the five major labels at 99 cents each. By the time iTunes for Windows arrived that October, customers had bought more than 13 million songs. The 99-cent song gave listeners a legal option cheap and simple enough to compete with file sharing, and it gave the record labels a reason to care whether people owned an iPod. From then on, the store made the player worth more than a rival's, and the player made the store worth using. That loop of hardware, software, and a store, each propping up the other two, is still the shape of Apple's business.

I was one of those listeners, eventually. Before my first iPod I used a lesser MP3 player. It was good, but it was never as seamless an experience. I owned the original iPod and, over the years, one or two more, including a Shuffle I never enjoyed using. The music on them came from all over. Some I bought from the iTunes Store, some I ripped from friends' CDs, and, when I was younger, some came from Napster and later DC++, the kind of file sharing the 99-cent song was built to beat.

Whatever was on it, an iPod was easy to spot, because the player advertised itself. Its white earbuds and cord stayed visible after it disappeared into a pocket, and in 2003 the agency TBWA/Chiat/Day built the silhouette ads around them, black figures dancing against bright colors with nothing identifiable but the white outline of an iPod and its earbuds. Every commuter wearing a pair became part of the campaign, unpaid.

The numbers followed. By April 2007 Apple had sold 100 million iPods, refreshing the line every year in a cycle the iPhone would inherit. In fiscal 2006 the iPod alone brought in $7.7 billion, about 40% of Apple's $19.3 billion in sales, more than the Mac's $7.4 billion. Sales peaked in fiscal 2008 at 54.8 million units and $9.2 billion.

What lasted was what the iPod taught Apple to do. When the nano and shuffle moved the line from hard drives to flash memory, Apple repeated Rubinstein's Toshiba move at industrial scale. In November 2005 it agreed to prepay $1.25 billion to Hynix, Intel, Micron, Samsung, and Toshiba to secure flash memory through 2010. Buying a supplier's future output in advance, in quantities that leave less for everyone else, is a habit Apple never dropped.

All of that machinery was in place when Apple built the product that ended the iPod. Introducing the iPhone on January 9, 2007, Apple called it three products in one, among them "a widescreen iPod with touch controls." Tony Fadell, the engineer Rubinstein had brought in to build the first iPod, later recalled that Jobs pitched him the phone by showing him a secret touchscreen prototype "the size of a ping pong table" and saying, "I want to take that and put it on an iPod." An attempt to dial with the click wheel went nowhere. "We were turning it into a rotary phone from the sixties," Fadell said.

Many hit products fall to a competitor, the way the Nintendo 64 lost to Sony's PlayStation, which outsold it about three to one. The iPod fell to Apple's own phone, and it fell fast. In fiscal 2014 iPod revenue fell 48% to $2.3 billion, about 1% of Apple's sales, while the iPhone brought in $102 billion on its own. The next year's annual report stopped listing the iPod separately. The same 2014 filing described prepayments to suppliers and manufacturing equipment Apple owned inside its partners' factories. The iPod was fading. Its methods had become the company's.

Apple discontinued the iPod classic on September 9, 2014, the day it introduced the iPhone 6. The last version held 160 GB on a spinning hard drive, the same kind of part that had started the line. The iPod touch held on until May 10, 2022, when Apple said it would be sold "while supplies last," and Greg Joswiak, its marketing chief, said that "the spirit of iPod lives on." My own iPod had been retired well before then. The iPhone replaced it entirely, and Spotify and Apple Music replaced the library I had spent years buying and ripping.

Which brings the story back to Ternus. He arrived at an Apple that was losing money and hoping a music player might help sell its computers, and he now runs a company whose playbook that player wrote. Find a component nobody else knows what to do with, and buy all of it. Let a product sell on its own, even to people who never buy a Mac. Own the store as well as the device. Make the part the public can see do the advertising. His own résumé includes AirPods, which put white earbuds back in commuters' ears more than a decade after the silhouettes. The iPod did not survive the iPhone, but the company it trained is now his to run.