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This Week Marks the 20th Anniversary of the iPod and 30th Anniversary of the PowerBook

The iPod was a game changer. I'd heard MP3s and thought they all sounded awful (funny how a 92kbps file will do that). A friend played the "Lord of the Rings" soundtrack for me on his iPod, and it was the first time I heard digital music that sounded like it came from physical media. It wasn't long after that I purchased my first iPod and started ripping CDs into iTunes. I still have so many 128kbps files from CDs that I have yet to re-rip into lossless, and now I wonder how they ever sounded good enough to get me to shift into the digital ecosystem, but I'm damned glad they did. Happy b-day, iPod. You changed the game, and you helped me to enjoy my music collection in ways I never would have imagined when I first started buying CDs.
 
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Both of these were introduced by Steve Jobs, and were wonderful starting points of their repective technology which took off and forms the basis of what we use everyday.
 
I still have mine. 1st gen. The battery is kind of dead but if I plug it to and outlet through FW, works like a charm. Love it. Still cool to use the clicking wheel.
 
The iPod really changed everything and eventually led to the iPhone and iPad. Hard to believe that was 20 years ago.
 
I bought a secondhand PowerBook 2300 a few years after their launch and loved it. Got a real bargain: monitor, dock and laptop, all in. I coveted a Titanium PowerBook later – a friend had one and it was such a beauty.
 
CopyChief said:
The iPod really started it all, didn't it? I was already a diehard Mac user at the time, but seeing how they applied the then-classic Apple philosophy to a music player was just incredible. It seemed a little expensive but after a few months I bought a refurbished iPod... which then had severe battery issues and I was able to have it replaced under warranty and ended up with a brand-new one.

I remember this ended the days of having sleeves of cassettes or CDs in my car. It let me take an incredible amount of music with me everywhere I went. It also made people think I was a smoker, because of the square-shaped bulge in my pocket. Those were the days, now we're all sporting square bulges and even fewer people smoke. Ha.

I'd like to think I saw the revolution coming. I'd like to think that I foresaw the convergence of devices that were slowly becoming such a big part of our lives. But I was just along for the ride like everyone else.

I still have my original iPod, and it still works... unfortunately I don't have a firewire-based computer to get any new music on it. The LCD screen and scroll wheel seem quaint now. I have a collection of other old gear, like the ill-fated iPod Photo... that are also just gathering dust along side an old AirPort router. I still even have miles (well, not quite miles) of phone cord used for an early AppleTalk network. Maybe it's time to clean out the cord box.
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I’m right there with you. I was one of those people back in junior high and high school sporting the original Walkman (and all of the competitors it spawned), got to work on a room mates Macintosh 128k (which I recognized then as being such a huge upgrade to the user experience compared to the mainframe I used in college (or the punch card computer I took classes on). The iPod was awesome, except for the fact that the hard drive was prone to being effected by fast movements. I couldn’t have it in a pocket while running, which was one of the reasons I bought it, and eventually the drive died, a common issue back then.

Remember how you had to spend hours copying all your cd’s onto your hard drive on your computer? And back then, speeds of both cd-drives and hard drives were so bad, so you’d set a cd to copy and had to walk away to do something else, because it effectively slowed the entire system down.

To think that there are so many people today who have zero experience or knowledge of the vast changes we’ve gone through, just in listening to music.
 
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wordsworth said:
I bought a secondhand PowerBook 2300 a few years after their launch and loved it. Got a real bargain: monitor, dock and laptop, all in. I coveted a Titanium PowerBook later – a friend had one and it was such a beauty.
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My first laptop was a PowerBook 5300.

I like to pretend it never happened… Traded it in for a Pismo G3 when Apple offered an exchange program because they were so terrible. 😁
 
I remember scoffing at the iPod as I awaited my Sony MiniDisc Player. Back then I was a Sony guy and thought Jobs lost his freaking mind. A couple hours later transferring music to the MiniDisc player discs and I knew I done F-ed up. Can't believe how down on the iPod I was as much of a super fan of Apple and Jobs I was back then. I was also convinced to not "waste" a financial windfall on buying AAPL a couple weeks before. :(
 
FightTheFuture said:
No one knew that AAPL would explode the way it has. You could say the same about other tech post bubble, like Netflix and Google.
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I bought AAPL stock even before the iPod. Apple kept being trash talked in the press back then but their fundamentals and cash were looking very good.

I only invested $1,000 because I didn't have much more money than that and silly me followed the advice "never invest more than you're willing to lose" and I was not willing to lose much.

It would serve me well later when it was worth well over 100k I had to sell it to take 3 years off work. But hey - it was all good. Nowadays would probably be worth 200k or more, I didn't follow the stock since.

But did I know it would explode the way it did, absolutely not lol. I just bought what I believed in. I also bought a bunch of other stocks to "make a quick buck" and all of them ended up penny stocks and 100% loss. Good lesson!
 
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Ahh the early 2000’s. I remember wistfully wishing that I didn’t have to lug around my cell phone, iPod, Palm Pilot and occasionally my digital camera. (Thankfully cargo pants were all the rage back then so I had ample pockets). It would have amazed 2001 me to know that all of those products would be combined into a single device.
 
Oh dang, I still remember lusting after the iPod when I first saw it, and finally being able to buy my 15gb iPod (3rd gen) in the summer of 2003, and being so in love with it.
I still have it, and it still works!
 
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tyche said:
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

Slashdot is forever famous for their iPod thought.

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
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Lol OMG what a classic. Another great lesson that came out of this is that tech geeks have no clue what people want or want to buy.

I loved the idea of an mp3 player so much I got the nomad when it came out - the first affordable mp3 player. The Creative Nomad was literally the worst user experience I've ever had, it was so bad I stopped using it even in the car, and went back to a CD player!

It had buttons strewn across the face in a random fashion
It looked like a portable CD player for no reason
The user interface made so little sense I had to read the manual to find the play button
Filling the player with music was a slow and painful process
It ran on batteries, so you could either throw 4 AAs (? - not sure) in the landfill every 8 hours of play time, or you could buy rechargeable AA batteries which would last 4 hours, then 3 the next week, then become unusable after a month.

Then the iPod came out and I immediately got one and went traveling with it - it was just amazing. I found a girlfriend on my travels and handed her the iPod with no instructions, and she'd never seen a mp3 player but she could play music with it instantly - it was that intuitive.
 
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Ah, the Powerbook 100. I took one with me all the way from first year to graduation in political philosophy. People were looking at me like an idiot when I brought a laptop into class (cue the insults). A few people asked me what I was typing.

Told em 'my class notes for the whole year'. No more futzing around with paper/pencil....until I started to work in the real world.

Tom
 
I actually worked at that event on the video crew. They had an iPod strapped into a camera rig (camera shooting down on it to see the face), I played with it a little and though "Huh. Neat.". So I guess I'm lucky I got to touch one before anyone in the general public did, but investing $1000 in AAPL that day, which I did not do, would have been a whole lot better. It would be worth over $700,000 today.
 
I actually have four old iPods. One first gen and three second gens. Bought as a lot on eBay that turned into a nightmare. One works. One mostly works. One dead. One had HD removed. Had to swap drives and logic boards just to get two to function. But alas, I got an old iPod to listen to nostalgic music on which was my goal. Thought of selling the whole thing on eBay just to recoup my money, but haven’t had time to fool with it. Would love to find one of these with a decent battery and shiny back. But replacing the battery damages the case unless one is super careful. And the ones on eBay with shiny backs are super expensive. I also would love to see apple release a throwback iPod that syncs and charges with usb c, no apps, AirPods support. I’d order it day one. Might not be as ‘practical’ but neither is my kindle oasis—but it does fulfill a single purpose very well.
 
tothemoonsands said:
Imagine a 20th anniversary iPod re-launch. Similar design and functionality as an iPod, but adds in some modern features. Support for Airpods. Wifi for direct downloading from Apple Music (no computer syncing required). Enhanced battery life. What else?
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Would buy one in a heart beat!! Sony kept the same Walkman alive, Apple could had done the same!!!

it’s sad that people never had an iPod and it shows 😭😭

the iPod click wheel was revolutionary!!
 
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