On May 10th, 2022, Apple announced it was discontinuing the iPod Touch, the last in the line of iPod products. We look back on the debut, evolution and impact of the iconic iPod.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Be there and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive reducer with I Heart Radio and how the tech are Young. Now, Normally on a Wednesday, I would attempt to bring to you a tech Stuff Tidbits episode, which is ostensibly supposed to be a shorter episode, but we all know how that goes when you got chatty Cathy over here yapping into the microphone. But today I'm just going to abandon all hope of this being tid bit ish. And that's because yesterday that being made tenth two thousand twenty two, Apple brought an end to an era. The company announced that it was discontinuing the iPod Touch, which is the last model in the iPod line to be made. All the others have already been retired. So the iPod was a transformational technology, and now iPod as a brand is going away. In fact, we get the term podcasting from the iPod. Now, the iPod was not the first MP three player, but it was the model that brought that technology into the mainstream. And moreover, the iPod played a pivotal role in turning Apple's fortunes around. It's pretty easy for us to forget these days that just a couple of decades ago, the multi trillion dollar company that is Apple today back then was on the verge of collapse. So I thought we could do a quick rundown of the history of the iPod and why I argue it is one of the most important technologies to emerge, specifically for me to get real selfish and egotistical about it, but one of the most technologies to emerge over the last couple of decades. Uh. And I think this dovetails nicely with Monday's episode about dr M disasters. In that episode, I talked about how Apple, under pressure from music labels, included DRM or digital rights management on digital files, that is, songs and albums that it sold through its iTunes music store. A few years later, Apple would be the company that was able to dictate its own terms because the tables had turned. And that's how much things changed in just a few years. The glove was on the other foot. I might be getting turned around. Anyway. Let's let's roll back the clock a bit. As I said, the iPod was not the first MP three player, and it definitely wasn't the first digital music player. There was a British inventor named Kane Kramer who came up with the idea for a digital music player way back in the late nineteen seventies. He filed a patent for his design, which he called the I X I or X or maybe it's supposed to be Roman numerals, but anyway, he he filed a patent for it in ninete and he received a patent in Because these things take time, that that device was capable of holding about three and a half minutes of audio, which would be about one and a half Ramons songs or the bit in a meat Loaf song just before meat Loaf starts to sing. Anyway, three and a half minutes is hardly useful. Digital audio files were really big and storage was really limited. That combo just meant that the digital audio player technology wasn't quite ready for prime time, which is putting it lightly. Skip ahead to the early nineteen nineties and the emergence of the MP three file format. I did a whole episode about the creation and evolution of MP three's, so this is just going to be a short version of that story. So the MP three format could compress audio files down to a more manageable size. The format does this by getting rid of information that's in the file. Ideally, it's information that doesn't impact the experience of listening to the audio. There's an entire psycho acoustic side to the MP three technology that's all about determining what would be perceivable or perceptible and what would not, and you just get rid of all the stuff that isn't. The idea being that if a human is incapable of hearing a particular sound, there's no reason to include that information in the compressed file. Now, of course, you can encode m P three's so that they are more or less aggressive in their approach to compressing file sizes. The more aggressive you get, the smaller the compressed file will be, but the worst it will sound. So this is a lossy file format. But if you go easy with your compression, then the file size it won't shrink down as much, but the fidelity the quality of the audio will be better. Anyway, the MP three format made audio files more practical for you know, the average person, like whether you wanted to just have them on your computer or potentially transfer them, say over the internet, by the late nineties, there were a couple of companies that were experimenting with digital audio players that could play MP three files. See before that the really the only way to enjoy MP three's was to listen to them on a computer. Eventually, you did have some CD player manufacturers that started to produce compact disc players that could read MP three compact discs. So in those cases, you could burn a CD with you know, more than a hundred songs on it in MP three format, so they're not being burned in the the the raw audio files that you would use to digitally imprint CDs. Instead, you're you're just burning MP three files to the CD. But those weren't commonplace, and there certainly weren't very many portable solutions around until the two thousand's, so it just was not a very convenient form factor yet. Then you had a couple of companies like Elgar Labs that started to introduce digital audio players that could play m P three's. Uh the Elgar Labs one was the mp man F ten. I'm guessing they were kind of naming their products so it was kind of similar to Sony's Walkman trademark, and the F ten had thirty two whole megabytes of memory, and it cost two hundred fifty dollars. There was also the Diamond Rio p MP three hundred, which was more popular. It also only had thirty two megabytes of storage. It hit the market not long after the F ten did. And please keep in mind that these play years didn't have native connectivity on them. You could not download music directly to the device. You could not stream anything to the device. Instead, you would have to use software on your computer to manage your music library. Then you would transfer songs from your computer to your MP three player using a physical cable that connected the two. This would be true for early iPods as well, In fact, true for everything up to and including the iPod Touch, at least in the early stages. The p MP three in particular helped start to churn up interest in the MP three format, right Like, there were geeks like me who were interested in MP three's back then. But once you got to a player that could actually store and play that stuff on its own and you could carry it around with you, that's when MP three's really started to gain some traction. That's also when the music industry really got involved. The recording Industry Association of America or r I double A sued real Port, which was in charge of making RIO and the software used to manage the RIO, because there was a general fear that folks would start buying compact discs, rip music from the c d s, and then share that music online without you know, everyone going through the proper process of forking cash over to the music labels, and the r I double A lost that lawsuit. The court said, no, the existence of this saying does not automatically mean what you say. It means. They're certainly not liable for people taking that that path. People might, but it's not the fault of the company for that, and MP three players and the software needed to transfer music from PCs two MP three players were deemed to be totally legal. It turned out the r I double A was kind of on point with its fears, even if it didn't have legal grounds to stop in P three players, because people did start to share music online, and then once the peer to peer network technology began to emerge, it really took off. It became pretty easy to distribute music files across lots of computers. So this was the birth of napster. In n and the music labels went banana. A downturn and media sales sent a shock way through the music industry, and they went nuclear on Napster and its users. Now on the MP three player side, developments began to push the technology forward. The remote solutions Personal jukebox MP three player did a big leap frog over earlier devices because it actually included a small hard drive from a laptop as its storage device, and that pushed the jukebox's capacity to four point eight gigabytes, which was leagues better than that thirty two megabyte limitation of the earliest MP three players. But generally speaking, these MP three players were bulky, They were not really attractive. The ones with hard drives were also very heavy and delicate because hard drives have moving mechanical components and if you were to say, drop your MP three player, you could damage those mechanical components and it wouldn't work anymore. And again, they weren't really stylish and they were really expensive. But Steve Jobs had an idea to change all that. I'll explain more when we come back after this quick break. Okay, so I had set the stage for the early days of the MP three player Steve Jobs was in charge of Apple at this time, and you know he had been a co founder of Apple. He essentially got for style of the company, or essentially pushed aside enough so that he left the company all depends on which account you listened to, then ultimately came back to rescue the company when it was on the verge of financial collapse. He saw the potential of the MP three player space, but the devices on the market lacked style, they lacked utility. No one was knocking it out of the park. The existing ones were just too big and bulky, and they were too ugly. And there were early adopter types who met the Venn diagram overlap of computer nerd and music nerd who were buying some of those early MP three players, But most MP three players just weren't user friendly enough or attractive enough to hit mainstream success. So Jobs goes to his senior VP of Industrial Design, Johnny I've, who was not yet a knight of the realm at this time. He is Sir Jonathan I've now, and Jobs laid out what he wanted. He wanted definitive MP three player that the average person would want to buy. It had to attractive, it had to be useful, it had to hold enough music to make it worthwhile, and this could really be Apple's next big thing. It took Johnny i'ves team a little less than a year to design, prototype, and finalize the first iPod, which Jobs himself with debut to a small crowd on October twenty three, two thousand one, and Jobs knew he had to win some skeptics over because this was a brand new business that Apple was getting into. So before unveiling the device itself, he explained that Apple was getting into this industry because quote, music is a part of everyone's life end quote. He made a business case for Apple to get into the MP three player business. He said, it's not a speculative business. This isn't something where we're placing a bet. This is a sure thing. Music is important for everyone, and so all he had to do is in at the history of the music industry and say there's your proof. So he was really dismantling criticisms before they could even be formed, which was pretty genius. He was also, by the way, totally right. So Jobs argued that there was no established leader in the digital music player space. He called out a couple of companies. He called out Creative, which made a model called the Zen. Actually owned a Creative Zen way back in the day, and he said, well, that one has had some success, but still a very small company. It can't produce these things at scale. Then you had Sony, which was a very very large company, but it had failed to produce a device that was a hit with consumers. So Jobs was saying this gave Apple the opportunity to swoop in and take the lead spot in a blossoming market. And he said that the iPod, the new Apple music device, could play the four most popular digital formats for music at the time, which were MP three, MP three VBR, Wave or w A V and ai F F H. The wave and ai F formats were for uncompressed audio, wave being essentially developed for Microsoft machines, and ai F being an Apple development. That means you you end up with better sound quality, but the file sizes are much larger, so you're able to store fewer files on your device. Now. The original iPod featured a digital screen and had a mechanical wheel to scroll through options and song choices. That mechanical wheel was flush with the front of the the iPods face so in other words, you would put your thumb on the surface of this wheel and rotate the wheel around in order to scroll through a menu or through your music's collection. It had a five gigabyte hard drive, which Job said was capable of holding up to one thou and songs, although he said like for most people, that would be their entire music library, so you could just have your whole library in your pocket. He also said those one thousand songs could be encoded at a bit rate of a hundred sixty kilobits. The hard drive in the original iPod had a platter that measured just one point eight inches in diameter and was point two inches thick, so very very thin. The iPod itself measured four inches tall, two point four inches wide, and was point seven eight inches thick. It was, as Jobs put it, the size of a deck of cards. Now I realized I mentioned just a second ago bit rate and I didn't really clarify what that was. But I do plan on doing a Tidbits episode in the near future to explain sample rate and bit rate for digital audio. Those two factors play an important part in how large an audio file is and the audio quality of that file. But I didn't want to take up all of this episode to talk about it, so let's get back to the iPod now. To connect the iPod to a computer, which originally was just limited to Mac computers, Apple built in a FireWire port on the iPod. Jobs said it would take ten seconds to load a CDs worth of music onto the iPod, compared to five minutes if you were using an old USB cable between a computer and an MP three player. He also said it could take up to ten minutes to transfer the full one thousand songs to an iPod, but it would take five hours if you wanted to do the same with USB, so he was really touting the superiority of FireWire over USB at the time. Jobs also said that the iPods battery would supply ten hours of continuous play, and that it would have fast charge capability to regain eighty percent of its capacity in one hour of charging, and that the FireWire cable would provide not just data transfer, but also provide power, so you could plug your iPod into your computer using the FireWire cable and you could charge your iPod while you're also transferring music to it, and all this for the low, low price of three dollars. If we were to adjust for inflation today, that would be about the same as six hundred fifty bucks yells them. Now, by the time Apple unveiled the iPod, the company had already launched iTunes. They launched iTunes at the beginning of two thousand one, and the iPod was announced in October of that year. Now, at that time, iTunes was strictly a digital music management program. You could put a CD into a Mac and you could rip music from that c D and make digital files of it and use iTunes to organize your music collection, but it would live on your computer. iTunes would then become the software component to manage iPods, at least on max, and connecting an iPod to your computer with iTunes would allow for automatic synchronization. So if you had added new music to your computer, well, the next time you plug your iPod in, those new tracks could transition seamlessly to your iPod, so you'd have them ready for when you're on the go. The iPod was a pretty big departure for Apple, and it was a success. You know, Apple had experimented with some uh consumer electronics outside of computers a bit in the past and had had let's say, mixed success. The Newton is a an infamous flop for Apple, right, but the iPod was not a flop, and the following year, in two thousand two, Apple updated the iPod. It would ultimately offer two models of the iPod, one that had a ten gigabyte hard drive, so twice of the size of the original, and the second would have a twenty gigabyte hard drive. They also replaced the old mechanical scroll wheel, so you no longer had a wheel that you could physically turn around on the face of this iPod, and they replaced it with a capacitive sensing touch wheel, so kind of like a touch screen in a sense, except it wasn't a screen. It was just this round, rounded section of the surface of the iPod, so you are no longer physically turning a wheel to scroll through stuff. The new iPods were also compatible with Windows PCs, which dramatically expanded the potential customer base for Apple in the process. Now, at the time, there was no iTunes for PC for for Windows, so PC users had to rely on software called Music Match Jukebox in order to organize their music collections and send music over to their iPods. The new iPod also had a thirty pin dock connector, and then you could use a dock that had FireWire or a dock that had USB. That was good because FireWire was pretty much unheard of on Windows PCs. There were some that had FireWire reports, but it was not a standard. It was far more common to run into USB connections. In two thousand three, Apple introduced iTunes for Windows and thus migrated away from Music Match, Jukebox and UM. iTunes for Windows was pants, meaning it was not good, at least in my opinion, at least back in those days. It felt bloated and unwieldy. It had massive processor demands. It took up too much of your computer memory. At least in my experience, I really didn't like using it. I'm sure I would have felt differently if I had owned a Mac computer instead of a Windows PC, but on Windows it was a shore. Oh. In two thousand three was also when Apple launched the iTunes music store, that that you could actually purchase digital music directly from Apple, rather than rip it from c D s uh. That was the other way you could really get music. There were some other independent and and studio owned digital music stores out there, but none of them had really taken off in popularity. And of course there was the black market piracy trading culture out there. Napster was gone by two thousand three. It had been sued out of existence. But it's not like piracy just went away after that. But this is when Apple introduced the legit iTunes music store. It's also when Apple would introduce the fair Play Digital Rights Management or DRM solution, which restricted iTunes purchases to play only on authorized devices. So this was again back when music labels had a lot of leverage over Apple. All Right, we've got a lot more to get through with the evil of the iPod and its eventual demise. But before we get into any of that, let's take another quick break. Okay, we're up to two thousand four. That's when Apple would expand iPod line again. So earlier years had seen iPods with you know, larger hard drive sizes and that kind of thing, like modest improvements, but two thousand four saw entirely new iPod models. Apple introduced the iPod many in two thousand four, and as the name suggests, it was significantly smaller than the standard iPod and it had a hard drive that could hold up to one thousand songs, similar to the original iPod. Apple also introduced the iPod Photo, which was an iPod with a color digital screen that could display photos on it. Obviously, you would transfer the photos from your computer to your iPod, you could scroll through them, and there was also a fourth generation standard iPod as well. Two thousand four was also when the term podcasting began to catch on. Now, the practice had been around for a while, right There had already been cases of serialized digital audio content that people could subscribe to that dated back a few years from before two thousand four, But two thousand four was where podcasting as a word really emerged. I would argue that that really drove home how Apple had nailed the MP three player technology and the marketing for digital audio players because it had become the de facto leader in the space and had to find the technology. You know, it didn't it didn't invent it, but they refined it to a point where that was the standard, so much so that an entire medium was named after the iPod podcasting. Then in two thousand five, we got the iPod Nano, which was an even smaller iPod than the iPod Mini. It used flash storage rather than a hard drive, and in the early days of digital audio players, flash storage was a real limitter and it was really expensive. It couldn't hold very much, and it cost a lot to produce. That's why Apple chose to go with physical hard drives for its early iPods. But by two thousand five, the capacity was starting to go up and the price was starting to come down, so the Nano was available in two gigabyte and four gigabyte capacity models. It had a color screen, and it was smaller than the iPod Mini was, which in turn was smaller than the standard iPod. A few months after it debuted, the Nano would replace the Mini and Apple would just discontinue the Mini model entirely. Also, two thousand five was when the iPod Shuffle came out. The iPod Shuffle h is an odd little thing. Most models don't have any display at all. Uh In fact, it has a pretty simple interface. It's got a power button, a play pause button, and controls that allow you to change the volume and skip a song or go back to a song. And the Shuffle could play songs you know, in whatever order was organized on the device, or as the name suggests it could shuffle them randomly, so the shovel was even smaller than the nano. It maxed out with a one gigabyte hard drive model when it launched, or I guess I should say flash drive model one gigabyte of storage when it launched. Also in two thousand five, Apple introduced a fifth generation iPod that was capable of playing video. So now we're at the point where you could transfer video files to a an iPod, which otherwise was modeled like the classic iPod, and you can watch those videos whenever you wanted. Where still in that where you had to physically connect your iPod with your your computer in order to synchronize files between the devices and to transfer new material to the iPods. So it's not like you could just download videos natively to the device. You still had to connect it physically to your computer to do that. And finally, two thousand five, finally, for two thousand five, anyway, it was a critical year for my profession. See that's the year that Steve Jobs announced that podcasts would be incorporated directly into iTunes, so iTunes users would be able to subscribe to podcasts and whenever they synchronize their iPods with their computers, any new episodes of the shows they subscribed to would automatically transfer to their iPod, and Apple took podcasting, which at that time was still a very young medium, and they pushed it further toward the mainstream. The success of the iPod in no small way contributed to the early growth of podcasts, though it would take more than a decade for podcasts to become popular enough so that the average person knew what the heck a podcast was. Occasionally I still run into people who aren't sure what a podcast is, but it's it's more rare these days now. The joke is everybody has a podcast. Back then, most people didn't even know what the heck podcast was. And it also became true pretty quickly that if you wanted your podcast to do well, you really had to hold out hope that Apple was going to feature your podcast on its podcast page, because that pretty much guaranteed you would see a rush of new subscribers. Some of the shows on our network, such as Stuff You Should Know, benefited tremendously due to Apple featuring the podcast on the iTunes podcast section. Now, I also have to point out that if it weren't for the fact that Stuff You Should Know is just a really great show with incredibly talented hosts. It wouldn't matter for all the promotion in the world, right, It wouldn't make a difference. If the show was terrible, people wouldn't stay subscribed to it. So I don't want to take any credit away from the creators. They are legitimately great at what they do, but the iTunes promotion helped them out considerably in the early days to get a big following. Now, two thousand six was less eventful than two thousand five. Apple released updated generations for the iPod and the Nano and the Shuffle. Nothing really spectacular to note here. The new models were obviously improvements over previous generations, but that was pretty much it. But then in two thousand seven we got two things that would be huge for Apple now. The really big one was the iPhone. By this time, Apple's image had really skyrocketed. The popularity of the iPod had truly transformed the company, and the iPhone would push Apple beyond the stratosphere and into lower th orbit at least. But that same year Apple also introduced the iPod Touch. The Touch was essentially an iPhone without the phone part. There was no cellular antenna in the iPod Touch, but it featured the same multi touch screen as the iPhone. Most of the internal components were the same. They would have a camera had it was able to run apps, at least apps that didn't require a cellular connection, so in many ways it was like an iPhone, just without the phone part. And the iPod Touch also had WiFi connectivity, so you could use an iPod Touch to browse the web or message people, and you could even purchase digital music wirelessly. You still couldn't synchronize wirelessly. That would come a little bit later. Apple still offered the original iPod form factor. I mean not the original original, because we're not talking about a mechanical scroll wheel or anything, but the the form factor that we associate with the old school iPods, and from that point for at Apple would refer to those types of iPods as the iPod Classic. By the end of two thousand seven, Apple had sold more than a hundred forty million iPods. Like I said, the iPod line transformed Apple, but the iPhone was going to be way more disruptive. Now. Over the following years, Apple would continue to evolve the Nano, the Shuffle, and the Touch iPod lines. It would continue to support the classic line, but those really didn't change too much year to year. In two thousand eight, Apple added a feature that let you play a random song on your nano's playlist if you just shook your nano. I really wonder how many nano's perished as people over enthusiastically tried to search for a cool random song. In Apple changed the nano design. It used to be kind of like a thin rectangle. It was much taller than it was wide, but the model turned the Nano into a square. It kind of looks like the watch face of an Apple Watch. In fact, the fourth generation iPod Touch would have a retina display, so that was a very high definition display capable of sharp, vibrant graphics. It could also shoot HD photos and videos, and it was the first iPod Touch to have a front facing camera, which meant you could actually use the iPod Touch to make FaceTime calls over WiFi. The fourth generation Touch would also get a further update that would allow for wireless synchronization with iTunes, so now you no longer had to dock your Touch to your computer to synchronize across the two devices. The fifth generation Touch got a larger screen and a lightning DOC connector, which allowed for even faster data transfer speeds. And during this time, Apple continued to support the iPod Classic models, but the company would ultimately discontinue those in stept Tober two thousand fourteen. The iPod Shuffle and the iPod Nano would get the same treatment in two thousand seventeen. Now, the reason I'm skipping over all that, like I'm going from essentially two thousand eight to two thousand four to two thousand seventeen, is because the evolution of the devices were the kind of gradual like they weren't. They weren't monumental leaps, and it would be ridiculous just to go from year to year and say, and here's where these minor changes came into play. But now five years later, in two Apple is saying goodbye to the Touch. And you might wonder why why is Apple sunsetting the iPod line entirely, Well, it really has to do with that pesky iPhone you see, as as the iPhones battery life and storage capacity and then ultimately access to streaming music services increased the demand for a standalone music playback device decreased. The Touch held out longer than the others because it was essentially a cheaper iPhone just without the cellular phone part. You could even do WiFi style calls on a Touch. In fact, my buddy I as Actor, used an iPod Touch as his mobile phone for a short while. I remember him telling me about that at c E S and it blew my mind. Now, if you look at how much iPods have contributed to Apple's revenue, you would see that they really hit their peak in two thousand six, not peak sales. They didn't hit their peak sales till two thousand and eight, But in two thousand six they contributed the most by percentage to Apple's overall revenue. In two thousand six, they were about of all of Apple's revenue, it just came from iPod sales. So so nearly half of all of Apple's revenue came from selling iPods in two thousand six. See, I told you that I pod really turned things around for Apple. Now, actual iPod sales, like I said, they peaked in two thousand eight, So they sold more iPods in two thousand eight than they did in two thousand six, they sold fifty four point eight million units. Back in two thousand six, they had sold thirty nine point four million. But in two thousand eight, even though they sold more iPods, those sales accounted for just tw Apple's revenue. And remember in two thousand six it was of Apple's revenue. That tells you a lot right there. Right If a company sells fifteen million more units two years later, but those sales contribute a smaller amount to the company's total revenue, something else is really taking off. That's something else was the iPhone. So the iPod was still a mega success, but the iPhone was leaving it in the dust. From two thousand eight, it was a downward trend. Now, it's not like iPod sales inanked immediately, but in two thousand nine it dipped from fifty four point eight million units to fifty four point one million units, and at that point the sales were accounting for around nineteen percent of the company's total revenue, because again, the iPhone was just a monster. By two thousand fourteen, the sales numbers were down to fourteen point four million units and accounted for about one percent of the total revenue for Apple. Now, after two thousand fourteen, Apple would just lump in iPod sales with other categories, so it became impossible to see how iPod sales and revenue were going. The iPhone had really eclipsed everything else, so it's not really a surprise that the iPod touch is going away, or that the iPod line in general is riding off into the sunset. Some folks like yours truly held out for a really long time and carried both an MP three player, and yes, I eventually abandoned my creative zen for an iPod Classic and also carried a smartphone at the same time. I was one of those people. I had two devices. That was because I didn't want to run down my phone's battery while playing music, nor did I want to fill up my phone's storage within an enormous music collection. Because streaming services really were a thing yet at least not a common thing. But eventually streaming services increased capacity and better battery life all made standalone MP three players kind of obsolete because smartphones could do it all. They could act as your music library and a streaming platform and a phone and a computer. There was no reason to have to carry two of them. Apple is going to sell off all remaining iPod touches that are in stock and then puff they'll be gone. So if you want one, now's the time to buy one before they all end up on the aftermarket at ridiculously pumped up prices that they are just not worth that they range in price from about hundred ninety nine dollars for a thirty two gigabyte model up to three dollars for a two hundred fifty six gigabyte model. There are a few different colors available, though not every color of iPod Touch has all the different storage capacities available. Some of them are already out of stock, and like I said, once the rest are gone, that's it. So farewell iPod. You set Apple on a trajectory to become one of the most powerful companies in the world, and you lent your name to an art form that has become my career. Plus, even though I am an Android smartphone user and I used to own a creative Zen MP three player, I do have to admit that the iPod form factor and its performance were top notch. Just wish that darn iTunes software had worked better on Windows. That's it for this episode of Tech Stuff. If you have suggestions for topics I should tackle in future episodes, please reach out to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.