Apple forgot to celebrate iPod’s 15th birthday

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iPod
Was it really 15 years ago?
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

An important anniversary passed this weekend, but you’d have been hard-pressed to remember based on the lack of recognition it received from Apple.

That milestone event was the 15th anniversary of the iPod, the portable music player that squeezed 1,000 songs into our pockets, sold upwards of 350 million units, and — up until the iPhone — was the best-known product in Apple history.

The device that changed Apple forever

The iPod, as we detailed in our retrospective article published over the weekend, made its debut on October 24, 2001. It wasn’t the first great new product Apple launched after Jobs’ return to the company (that would have been the iMac G3, closely followed by the iBook).

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However, it was the device which confirmed that not only was the Apple of the 2000s going to be nothing like the Apple of the 1990s — despite continuing to experiment with new product categories — but that media and mobile devices were going to be the next big focus for Apple.

Without the iPod, there wouldn’t have been an iTunes Store and quite probably no iPhone either, since Apple’s first dip into the world of phones (which convinced it that it could do better than the established giants) was an attempt to include iTunes on a Motorola.

To be fair, it’s not a total surprise that Apple would ignore the birthday of the iPod. If you ever want to feel old as a tech consumer (and who doesn’t want to be reminded of their own mortality on a Monday morning?) watch this video, which shows kids who weren’t even born in 2001 prodding away at the original iPod like it’s some kind of prehistoric museum piece.

The product is considered such an incidental piece of Apple’s revenue stream these days that it doesn’t even report sales of the iPod.

Look forward, not back

Apple has also rarely been a sentimental company. Shortly after Steve Jobs returned to the company he co-founded in the late 1990s, he gave Apple’s historical archive — comprising records that management at Apple had kept since the mid-1980s — to Stanford University Libraries because he didn’t want the company to be fixated on the past.

A few years after that, in 1996, an ex-Apple employee named David Pakman who had worked there from 1991 through 1997 emailed Steve to suggest staging a celebratory event for Apple’s thirtieth birthday. He received a simple answer:

David,

Apple is focused on the future, not the past.

—Steve

With that said, Tim Cook has sometimes shown himself willing to be nostalgic about Apple’s past in a way Jobs wasn’t. When the Mac turned 30 back in 2014, Apple retail stores put up a 30th birthday window display, and received commemorative black t-shirts, and even special name badges for the employees.

My personal favorite Apple celebration, meanwhile, was special “30 Years” section of its official website that let users scroll through a visual timeline of the Mac’s entire history — starting with the first edition and going all the way through to the then-new Mac Pro.

Would a similar thing have been in order for the iPod’s birthday? Or would acknowledging that its now well into its teenage years simply serve to put off the younger audience, who are now the iPod’s primary market? Leave your comments below.

I still don’t think a Tim Cook tweet or a homepage image on Apple.com would have hurt, though.

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