I remember the birth of the iPod, 25 years ago this month. I was working at Newsweek. It was October 23, little more than a month after the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and everybody was focused on the aftermath. I didn’t go to Cupertino for the launch, where Steve Jobs pulled the gadget from his jeans pocket and boasted that it contained a whole music library. Apple couriers hand-delivered the device to me in New York, and Jobs got on the phone with me. “iPod,” he told me, “will be a landmark product.”
He was right. By 2004, I was writing a cover story called “iPod Nation,” and later I published a book about the iPod called The Perfect Thing.
The death of the iPod wasn’t as memorable. It’s not even clear when it happened. Officially, one might date the time of death as occurring on May 10, 2022, when Apple discontinued the iPod Touch, the last product to use that name. But I never considered the Touch a real iPod; it was simply an iPhone without cellular connectivity. Maybe the appropriate death call might have been July 27, 2017, when Apple killed the Nano—the last traditional iPod with a screen—and the iPod Shuffle, a postage-stamp-sized player that clipped to your shirt. (Apple had quietly discontinued the classic iPod, with a hard drive and click wheel, in 2014.)
All these final dates were an inevitable consequence of what Steve Jobs put in motion on January 11, 2007. That’s when he announced three new products—a phone, an internet device, and “the best iPod ever,” all integrated into a new thing called the iPhone. From that moment on, the iPod as a separate device was living on borrowed time.
Still, for years, Apple sold millions more of the beloved devices before the iPod went silent. But even as we love our smartphones, the iPod scratched an itch that still lingers, and I’m sticking to my claim that the iPod was The Perfect Thing. It was a one-function device that superbly executed its function. It made people unconditionally happy. In contrast, our relationships with our iPhones (and Android phones) are more complicated. Yes, the device that superseded the iPod is galaxies more impactful than its predecessor. Financially, of course, it is the engine of a $4 trillion company. I can’t imagine any other contender for the mantle of best product of the century.
But I would not call the iPhone perfect. It gobbles our attention, sometimes with toxic social media apps. Countless cars have been totaled because drivers were more interested in its touch screen than what was happening on the other side of the windshield. iPhone doomscrolling can result in depression. Whereas that perky iPod brought nothing but joy.
Adding to the excitement was Steve Jobs’ willingness to redesign the iPod every year. Apple could have maintained its original iPod for a long spell, but almost immediately the company began a series of significant reinventions. Every cycle yielded an iPod with a different size and shape. With each iteration, the iPod seemed to grow smaller and cooler. First came the mini, then came multiple variations of nanos and shuffles in crazy colors and configurations. iPhone updates have kept people buying, but without the fun of a total reshaping of the product.
Is there an alternate universe where Apple continued making the iPod as a dedicated digital music player? I called Tony Fadell to discuss. Fadell is often referred to as the father of the iPod; he headed its hardware team and delivered the product in an amazing sprint of less than a year. He later was deeply involved in developing the iPhone, and his post-Apple career includes cofounding Nest, becoming a successful tech investor, and writing a well-received book.
Fadell resigned from Apple in 2008 and consulted for two years after that, when Apple was still supporting the iPod. But he recalls Jobs and other execs agreeing that the device was on a course to oblivion, despite being a great product with an enthusiastic user base. With the iPhone proving to be a monster success that also helped boost the Macintosh, and Apple pursuing potentially mass-market innovations like the iPad, iPod sales were becoming less relevant to the company’s bottom line. Jobs was a relentless prioritizer, and his successor Tim Cook felt the same way.
Fadell says that there was very little hand-wringing about the iPod’s fate. “The discussion was about Apple [not] doing lower-value things,” he says. Yet he agrees with me that the iPod’s disappearance created a hole that hasn’t been filled.
In retrospect, he says, what made the iPod invaluable is what it didn’t do—connect with the internet. “Because the iPod wasn't connected, you didn’t have all these other things going on to distract you. Today, you get all the annoyance of being connected without being able to get the same listening experience. You can always be distracted and go somewhere else.”
“This thing should still exist,” he says.
A lot of people seem to agree. There are multiple active communities on Facebook and Reddit of refuseniks who go to great lengths to mod old iPods—putting in large flash drives, installing Bluetooth. There’s even an app that makes your iPhone look and play like an iPod Classic. It works great, but you’re still one swipe away from your feeds, your mail, and everything else in your life that isn’t as fun as music.
I ask Fadell how he regards the iPod’s legacy. Tellingly, his answer speaks to Apple’s history more than exhilaration for the product itself. “The iPhone never would have existed without it,” he says. “That means that the Apple we know of would never have existed without the iPod.” It helped turn a computer company with a limited user base into a consumer electronics giant.
“And the crazy thing is that it was exactly 25 years ago—which is half the years that Apple has existed. There was the Apple II, and then the Mac, and then, boom,” he adds.
I prefer to remember the iPod for what it was, not what it led to. Not long ago, I exhumed my iPod Classic. I have an old boombox with a cradle designed for the iPod, with the old 30-pin connector. I put it in shuffle mode and blissed out.
I suspect a lot of others might like to return to iPod Nation. New CEO John Ternus has no incentive to revive the product, of course. I do find it sad, however, that a generation exists that doesn’t know what it’s like to have a dedicated music device that will never interrupt a tune with calls, texts, and notifications. They don’t know what they’re missing.
This is an edition of Steven Levy’s and Lauren Goode's Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
