Designed by Apple, Inc., iPod is a portable media player (PMP) for storing and playing audio files encoded by MP3 or AAC compression algorithms. It can hold anywhere from a few hundred to ten thousand of songs, perhaps more. Selling by millions, it has surpassed mere popularity worldwide.
Apple, Inc. began looking at the range of digital devices since they had missed competing on video and still cameras, and hand-held organizers. As they have produced software for storing and playing digital music, they also realized the players of the digital music were not user-friendly.
Tony Fadell Offers Ideas Early 2001
MP3 players of the time were disappointing, flash memory chips had limited tracks hard drives were too big to store music on. Aside from difficulty in navigating the player menus, the process for transferring songs from computer to players was slow.
The story goes that a computer engineer, Tony Fadell, had an idea for a new style of MP3 player, which could be linked to its own digital music store. He promoted his idea to some manufacturers, one of them, Apple, Inc.
iPod Works
Apple saw the opportunity. In the early 2001, response came through Jon Rubinstein, Apple's chief hardware engineer. He gave the go-signal to start work on the digital music player provided it is in stores by Christmas.
Apple, Inc. Launch: October 23, 2001
Fadell and his team of engineers used as the central component a version of a microprocessor which had previously powered mobile phones, and the original IPod was completed in six months. Apple announced it's release on October 23, 2001, two months before Christmas.
iPod's Success
The original five gigabyte model iPod was priced at US$399, an amount lambasted by critics and complained about incompatibility with Windows. Consumers hungry for a functional pocket-sized music player accepted the cost, and more than 100,000 iPods were sold before the year 2001 ended.
The iPod's design resulted in a superior listening pleasure, and made music more accessible. Apple, the computer company, has taken a big bite out of the music industry. Apple sold numbers of iPod units beyond their own expectation.
iPod Previous Product line
iPod's former products include the compact iPod Mini and the spin-off iPod Photo. iPod Classic models store media on an internal hard-drive, while all other models use flash memory to enable their smaller size, the discontinued mini using a microdrive miniature hard drive.
As with many other digital music players, iPods, excluding the iPod Touch, can also serve as external data storage devices. Storage capacity varies by model.
iPod Year Current 2008 Product Line
- hard drive-based iPod classic
- touchscreen iPod Touch
- video-capable iPod Nano
- screenless iPod Shuffle
- iPhone
iPod beyond 2008? Who knows. Perhaps, Apple, Inc. can give us a clue.
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