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Apple Celebrates 20th Anniversary of Taking Podcasts Mainstream With iPod and iTunes

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To celebrate the 20th anniversary of iTunes gaining support for podcasts, Apple has shared a new web page highlighting 20 podcasts that the company loves.

Apple-Podcasts-20.jpg

The podcasts are categorized by year: 2005-2010, 2011-2015, 2016-2020, and 2021-2025.

Featured podcasts include This American Life, Acquired, The Daily, and others.

Apple shared a letter to honor the occasion:
At Apple Podcasts, we love podcasts.

Since the medium came to iTunes in 2005, our team has dedicated countless hours to helping people discover new shows. To celebrate 20 years, here are 20 favorites that best exemplify how far podcasting has come—and where it can go in the next two decades.

This list is a love letter to the podcasts that left a lasting impact on us and the ones we continue to recommend again and again. They are shows with hosts that feel like friends, and shows that make us press play immediately on the latest episode to hear what happens next. These shows have measurably improved our lives and helped define this medium we know and love.

Explore the list and join the celebration.
Click to expand...
The anniversary is technically in a few more days, as Apple released iTunes 4.9 with support for discovering, listening to, and subscribing to podcasts on June 28, 2005.

"Apple is taking Podcasting mainstream by building it right into iTunes," said Steve Jobs, in a press release shared that day. "Podcasting is the next generation of radio, and users can now subscribe to over 3,000 free Podcasts and have each new episode automatically delivered over the Internet to their computer and iPod."

You can still read our own Arnold Kim's coverage of the iTunes update that day. Time flies!

Podcasts emerged a few years before iTunes support came along. The word "podcast" is credited to journalist Ben Hammersley, who referred to "podcasting" in a 2004 article in The Guardian. The word is a portmanteau of "iPod" and "broadcast."

Article Link: Apple Celebrates 20th Anniversary of Taking Podcasts Mainstream With iPod and iTunes
 
Article Link
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/26/apple-celebrates-20-years-of-podcasts-in-itunes/
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Podcasting changed my media consumption in a big way. I was always a radio person, but my annoyances with radio hosts not talking about Hockey (or disparaging the sport saying no one cares) made me look elsewhere. Then I found podcasts and have been listening to more podcasts than radio. The thing I don't like is this feeling like they want to go to Video and Youtube and you have to watch the shows rather than listening to the shows while you do other things. It's hard to watch video and work out, for example. It hasn't felt like 20 years.

I still listen to SiriusXM on occasion but the only time I go back to Terrestrial radio is to listen to Giants games. Can't stand what the local Sports stations have become.

Itunes was so revolutionary for it's time. I still remember when they were joking at a WWDC that it became basically the go to to everything and there is truth to that. Still, I miss the days of the old Itunes, the Single of the week, getting Podcasts synced to my Ipod, stuff like that. It was quite a world.
 
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Man, 20 years. I remember my dad downloading some early podcasts for us to listen to in the car on road trips. Time flies!

Nowadays, I listen to Connected (an Apple podcast) and It's Super Effective (a Pokemon podcast).
 
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I cut the cord to cable back in 2007 with the first tv before there was streaming content. I'd buy entire seasons of TV shows and movies but I survived mostly on a diet of Podcasts. I'd listen to the Podfather Adam Curry and video podcasts from Diggnation and others. Anyone remember Revision3?
appletv-original-ui1510611898283.jpg


Honestly, I kind of miss those days of innocence when podcasts were truly self productions and conversation style shows. Now many of them have gone corporate and high level production and it doesn't feel as authentic.
 
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Such a long time ago. Will surely check out some of them from the list Apple has highlighted.
 
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Personally, it really helped Apple that when podcasts rolled out on iTunes in 2005, this was at the height of interest of the Harry Potter books (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince came out one month after Apple started to make podcasts available on iTunes). As such, there was large audience for discussion podcasts of these books back then, as we saw by the huge number of downloads for Mugglecast and Pottercast.
 
I used to like podcast but feel like they're kind of like LLM AI - everyone sounds super confident and cherry picks things to make themselves sound correct but when you do your own research you get a more complete picture.

Podcaster A:
- Climate change is a hoax, look at this study that says the Earth is in a cool period.

Maybe that's true overall, depending on if you look at a 20,000, 100,000, 1,000,000 or 485,000,000 year timeframe. What isn't disputed that there's no point in the Earth's history climate has changed so drastically since the Industrial Revolution. It's also true that politicians will use either side of this spectrum to feed into identity politics and try to control tax revenue with it.

Podcaster B:
- Don't drink coffee right when you wake up

A bunch of caffeine studies say this has no real impact on anything

My point is there's no real nuance in podcasters (and probably audiences) anymore, everyone wants to be right and in some kind of power dynamic. It's annoying AF when you just want to learn about new topics. To me it kind of invalidates the long form nuance people craved in the first place.

I like the old Radio Lab show but that started on the radio before it became a pod and I'm sure a bunch of studies invalidate some of their entertainment driven content.
 
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sjsharksfan12 said:
Podcasting changed my media consumption in a big way. I was always a radio person, but my annoyances with radio hosts not talking about Hockey (or disparaging the sport saying no one cares) made me look elsewhere. Then I found podcasts and have been listening to more podcasts than radio. The thing I don't like is this feeling like they want to go to Video and Youtube and you have to watch the shows rather than listening to the shows while you do other things. It's hard to watch video and work out, for example. It hasn't felt like 20 years.

I still listen to SiriusXM on occasion but the only time I go back to Terrestrial radio is to listen to Giants games. Can't stand what the local Sports stations have become.

Itunes was so revolutionary for it's time. I still remember when they were joking at a WWDC that it became basically the go to to everything and there is truth to that. Still, I miss the days of the old Itunes, the Single of the week, getting Podcasts synced to my Ipod, stuff like that. It was quite a world.
Click to expand...

As a fan of pro cycling, I can say that Podcasts have been transformative for people how follow smaller sporting events. There are probably not enough people interested in niche sports to create a local radio station, but certainly enough in the aggregate to support several podcasts.
 
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Started a small bible study program on a local AM station in my town in 2004 when I was barely out of high school. As far as I know, very few people listened to it in my town for the 10 years I did it. But, I read a MacUser magazine article about podcasts and rss feeds, I turned my little 15 minutes a week thing into something at Podcast Alley, then iTunes, and I was able to help a few people for the next decades. Those were the most ___ whatever word I'm looking for) years in my life.

One more thing… yet, I have an open support case with Apple for a couple of months now because the Podcasts app will not stay in sync among my devices. Episodes get marked as unplayed, Shows get unsubscribed, shows I don't subscribe to show up… it is a complete mess.

A bittersweet, symphony, that's life.
 
thefredelement said:
I used to like podcast but feel like they're kind of like LLM AI - everyone sounds super confident and cherry picks things to make themselves sound correct but when you do your own research you get a more complete picture.

Podcaster A:
- Climate change is a hoax, look at this study that says the Earth is in a cool period.

Maybe that's true overall, depending on if you look at a 20,000, 100,000, 1,000,000 or 485,000,000 year timeframe. What isn't disputed that there's no point in the Earth's history climate has changed so drastically since the Industrial Revolution. It's also true that politicians will use either side of this spectrum to feed into identity politics and try to control tax revenue with it.

Podcaster B:
- Don't drink coffee right when you wake up

A bunch of caffeine studies say this has no real impact on anything

My point is there's no real nuance in podcasters (and probably audiences) anymore, everyone wants to be right and in some kind of power dynamic. It's annoying AF when you just want to learn about new topics. To me it kind of invalidates the long form nuance people craved in the first place.

I like the old Radio Lab show but that started on the radio before it became a pod and I'm sure a bunch of studies invalidate some of their entertainment driven content.
Click to expand...

Depends on the podcast, but I agree that there are too many "hot takes". I tend to stick to things that aren't news, politics, debate or interviews, and are more story or special-interest focused

I quit listening to Radio Lab when Robert retired. The only old Podcast I have stuck with is This American Life.
 
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Put whoever did the graphic design for this logo on the MacOS design team.

Crazy to think that the "pod" part of Podcasts outlived the iPod itself. Leo Laporte tried to change the name to Netcasts but it never caught on.
 
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