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 Yes, the device that superseded the iPod is galaxies more impactful than its predecessor.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.