iPod
What Happened
The iPod launched on October 23, 2001, with Steve Jobs holding it up and promising '1,000 songs in your pocket.' In an era of clunky MP3 players with worse interfaces, the click wheel and iTunes integration felt like magic — and it looked like nothing else on the market.
Over 21 years, Apple sold more than 450 million iPods across the Classic, Nano, Shuffle, Mini, and Touch. It didn't just save Apple as a company — it set up the hardware + software + services pattern that would later define the iPhone, App Store, and everything after. For years it accounted for close to half of Apple's revenue.
The iPhone, launched in 2007, began the iPod's long death. Why carry two devices? The iPod Touch held on for a decade as a gateway device for kids and a cheap iOS entry point, but streaming quietly killed the idea of owning songs. The iPod's purpose evaporated in plain sight.
On May 10, 2022, Apple announced the discontinuation of the iPod Touch — the last iPod standing. A product line that once defined portable music was retired in a single press release. The device that taught the world to walk around with their entire music collection died because its parent became something bigger.
