The iPod is essentially Apple’s typewriter: a piece of technology that reshaped society completely, then was made redundant by its descendants. However, the iPod’s birth a decade ago launched a legacy that can’t be ignored, no matter how hard you try.
![The Many Fruits Of The iPod Family Tree [Infographic]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/plugins/lazy-load/images/1x1.trans.gif "ipodheader")
iPod 10th Anniversary: To celebrate the iPod’s 10th anniversary on Sunday October 23, we’ve been running several special features which we hope will allow our readers to look back at Apple’s most iconic product with fun and fondness.
Over the last ten years, the iPod has gone from a single device designed to hold your MP3s to a family of devices that have literally revolutionized the music industry.
As part of our iPod 10th Anniversary Celebrations, we put together this family tree infographic so you can look back at all of the iPods that have come before, and helped get us to where we are now: the future of digital music.
Feel free to repost this graphic, but if you do, please make sure to link to Cult of Mac. Thanks!
I arrived at this party pretty late — I’m probably the junior member here at the Cult of Mac, as far as Apple adoption goes. I haven’t discussed it directly with the entire staff, but I’m almost certain everyone else here had been using Steve’s gadgets long before I started.
My wholesale defection from PC to Mac finally happened in 2005, when I walked out of the Stonestown Galleria Apple Store, beaming, with a 12-inch iBook G4, never to return to the world of Windows. But the journey began two years earlier, when I met and fell in love with my first Apple product.
Yes, it was an iPod.
A decade ago Apple introduced the iPod, and with it a new method for controlling music playback: a scroll wheel with buttons around the perimeter. The interface was novel for a portable music player, which usually used more traditional buttons in a linear or grid layout.
The scroll wheel was the brainchild of Phil Schiller, Apple’s Director of Marketing. He realized that users would have to navigate large lists of songs, and that a wheel offered an intuitive, dynamic solution.
When the original iPod launched ten years ago, it was a very different beast to the svelte little beauties we know today. They were large, they only worked with Macs and they synced via bulky Firewire cables. Nonetheless, they were the best music players around at the time, and they made you feel proud to be an Apple fan-boy and to own a Mac.
Back then, the web unboxing meme hadn’t taken off, and yet all the love, care and attention that Apple puts into their packaging was already present. So I thought it would be a fitting tribute to unbox an original iPod as if it was the latest toy to be “Designed in Cupertino, CA.” Enjoy…
The days of the stand-alone music player may be over, but the iPod’s role as the preeminent fitness gadget could keep the product relevant for the next decade to come.
iPod 10th Anniversary: To celebrate the iPod’s 10th anniversary on Sunday October 23, we’re running several special features this weekend. We’ll have an illustrated cultural history, appreciations and op eds. Check back for more.
Fire, the wheel, and the iPod. In the history of invention, gadgets don’t come more iconic than Apple’s digital music player.
The iPod is to the 21st century what the big band was to the ’20s, the radio to the ’40s, or the jukebox to the ’50s – the signature technology that defines the musical culture of the era. And what a marvelous technology the iPod is. Inside Apple’s little white box is magic, pure magic, in the guise of music.
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![The Many Fruits Of The iPod Family Tree [Infographic]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/iPodTree3.jpg "iPodTree3")
