January 12, 2005: Apple reports record earnings for the preceding three months. Holiday sales of the iPod, and demand for the latest iBook, give the company a four-fold increase in profits.
Apple brags that it 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 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, either.
For the first computer setup featured in the new year, we look backward. Not to the recently subsided and mostly loathed 2021, but further back to a controversial Apple product launch from nearly a decade ago. And deeper into Apple’s storied history. Cult of Mac reader Michael De Jong shared some interesting older gear and some iconic imagery with us in his setup photographs.
SpotCam recently unveiled its new SpotCam Pano 2, a smart, 5-megapixel cloud security AI camera with free, full-time, continuous cloud recording to make sure you always have your footage. The company, founded in Taiwan in 2013, said it’s the only camera brand to offer that.
An accidental collaboration with Apple saved NBC sitcom The Office from cancellation during its second season.
A fifth-generation iPod took a starring role in an episode of the comedy series. Then, the unlikely cameo spurred sales of reruns of the show on iTunes. And the rest is history.
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 will 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 26, 2004: Apple debuts its iPod Photo, a device capable of putting not just 15,000 songs in your pocket, but also 25,000 photographs.
It is the first iPod to offer a color screen and the ability to display digital images and album cover art. The iPod Photo represents a big step forward in the functionality of Apple’s iconic music player.
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!
Editor’s note: Today marks the 20th anniversary of the iPod, the humble digital music player that reshaped Apple. To mark the occasion, Cult of Mac updated its illustrated history of the iPod — put together to celebrate the device’s 10th anniversary, and originally published on Oct. 22, 2011.
The iPod grew out of Steve Jobs’ digital hub strategy. Life was going digital. People were plugging all kinds of devices into their computers: digital cameras, camcorders, MP3 players.
The computer was the central device, the “digital hub,” that could be used to edit photos and movies or manage a large music library. Jobs tasked Apple’s programmers with making software for editing photos, movies and managing digital music. While they were doing this, they discovered that all the early MP3 players were horrible. Jobs asked his top hardware guy, Jon Rubinstein, to see if Apple could do better.
October 16, 2003: Six months after opening the iTunes Music Store for Mac owners, Apple expands the service to cover Windows PCs as well.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs later quips that making iTunes available to Windows owners is akin to “giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.”
