Tony Walker has been an Apple user since 2003. As a college student in his early 20s, he did his classwork on a 12-inch PowerBook G4 and a 3rd generation iPod during downtime at his graveyard-shift job.
Things have changed a little almost two decades later.
February 12, 2012: Months after his untimely death, Steve Jobs is honored with a Special Merit Grammy Award in recognition of his contributions to the field of music with the iPod and iTunes Music Store.
Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of internet software and services, collects the Grammy on behalf of Jobs’ family and “everyone at Apple.”
January 12, 2005: Apple reports record earnings for the preceding three months, with holiday sales of the iPod and demand for the latest iBook giving the company a four-fold increase in profits.
Apple brags that it has sold a total of 10 million iPods, and rightly so. The massive popularity of the portable music player drives Apple to its highest earnings ever.
January 8, 2004: The clumsily named Apple iPod + HP, a Hewlett-Packard-branded iPod, makes it debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Shown off by Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, the prototype device is colored blue, the color used for HP’s branding. By the time it arrives on the market later that year, however, the device is the same shade of white as the regular iPod. It doesn’t hang around for long.
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November 14, 2006: Apple teams up with a slew of airlines to offer the “first seamless integration” between iPods and in-flight entertainment systems.
A special dock would let iPod owners play music and videos on planes’ seat-back displays. The plan promises to rid the world of old-fashioned in-flight movies and airline magazines.
October 23, 2001: Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduces the first iPod, a device capable of holding an entire music library in a highly portable package.
The first-generation device boasts a 5GB hard drive capable of storing “1,000 songs in your pocket.” That may not sound too dazzling in a world in which people can stream the massive Apple Music library from their iPhones. But it was a game-changer at the time!
October 16, 2003: Six months after opening the iTunes Music Store for Mac owners, Apple expands the service to cover Windows PCs as well.
Steve Jobs later quips that making iTunes available to Windows owners is akin to “giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.”
The seventh-generation iPod nano, Apple’s last model, will be added to the company’s list of “vintage” products later this month.
First introduced in 2015, the device was marketed as the thinnest iPod ever, with the ability to connect to Bluetooth headphones and speakers, a built-in FM radio tuner, and a 2.5-inch color display.
Apple teamed up with the U.S. government to build a modified iPod that might have been a stealth Geiger counter for detecting and measuring ionizing radiation, claims former Apple software engineer David Shayer.
In an article for TidBits, Shayer — who left Apple in 2015 — described the secret project as a “special assignment” only known to about four people at Apple. It was his job to assist two engineers working for a U.S. defense contractor to the Department of Energy.
