fbpx

Goodbye to the iPod – The New York Times


The iPod started with a modest goal: Let’s create a music product that will get people to buy more Macintosh computers. In a few years, it will change the consumer electronics and music industry and lead to Apple becoming the most valuable company in the world.

First Arrived in October 2001The pocket-sized rectangle with a white face and polished steel frame weighed 6.5 ounces. It came packaged with white earphones in a custom color, moon gray color, and held 1,000 songs.

Its popularity exploded in the years that followed, creating what became known as the iPod generation. For most of the 2000s, people traveled the world with earplugs dangling from their ears. The iPod was everywhere.

On Tuesday, Apple officially said goodbye to all that. The company announced that its production has been phased out. ipod touchBy ending a twenty-year-old product line that inspired the creation of the iPhone and helped make Silicon Valley the epicenter of global capitalism.

According to Loup Ventures, a venture capital firm specializing in technology research, Apple has sold an estimated 450 million copies since it launched the iPod in 2001. Last year, it sold an estimated three million iPods, which is a fraction of the estimated 250 million iPhones it has sold.

Apple assured customers that music would continue, largely through the iPhone it introduced in 2007, and Apple Music, seven years of service This testifies to the modern preferences of customers. The days of buying and owning songs for 99 cents on an iPod have largely led to monthly subscription offers that provide access to wider catalogs of music.

The iPod brought together unrivaled industrial design, hardware engineering, software development and services, providing a blueprint for Apple for decades. It also showed that the company rarely debuted with a new product, but often triumphed.

In the late 1990s, the first digital music players began to appear. The earliest versions could hold several dozen songs, allowing people in the early days of copying CDs to their computers to transfer these songs to their pockets.

Returning to Apple in 1997 after being fired more than a decade ago, Steve Jobs saw the emerging category as an opportunity to give Apple’s legacy computer business a modern appeal. A staunch music fan who rankled the Beatles and Bob Dylan among his favorite artists, Mr. Jobs thought tapping into people’s love of music would help persuade them to switch from more than 90 Microsoft-powered PCs to Macintoshes. percent market share.

“You didn’t need to do any market research,” said Jon Rubinstein, who headed Apple’s engineering at the time. “Everybody loved music.”

Mr. Rubinstein helped spark the product’s development when he discovered a new hard disk drive made by Toshiba during a trip to Japan. The 1.8-inch drive was capable of storing 1,000 songs. In essence, Sony made possible a Walkman-sized digital player that was far more capable than anything else on the market.

The development of the iPod coincided with Apple’s acquisition of a company with MP3 software that would become the basis for iTunes, a digital jukebox that organizes people’s music libraries so they can quickly create playlists and transfer songs. It strengthened Mr. Jobs’ vision of how people will buy music in the digital age.

“We think that people want to buy their music by downloading it from the internet, like buying LPs, buying cassettes, buying CDs,” he said. He said in his 2003 speech.

At the time, a service called Napster was tormenting the music industry and made it possible for people to share any song with anyone from anywhere in the world for free. Mr. Jobs addressed the woes of the music industry by marketing the new Macs’ ability to rip CDs with the commercial slogan: “Rip. Mixture. Burn.” According to Albhy Galuten, then executive at Universal Music Group, the campaign puts the music industry in Apple’s corner.

Mr. Galuten said the companies eventually agreed to let Apple sell songs on iTunes for 99 cents. “We saved it because we didn’t have the leverage,” said Mr. Galuten. “The easiest way to fight piracy was convenience.”

The $399 price tag of the first-generation iPod stifled demand, limiting the company to less than 400,000 units in its first year. Three years later, Apple released the 3.6-ounce aluminum-encased iPod Mini in silver, gold, pink, blue, and green. It cost $249 and carried 1,000 songs. Sales exploded. By the end of its fiscal year in September 2005, it had sold 22.5 million iPods.

By making iTunes available for Windows computers, Apple strengthened the iPod Mini and allowed Apple to promote its brand to millions of new customers. Former executives said that although the maneuver was later heralded as a brilliant move by the business community, Mr. Jobs resisted it at the time.

Soon, iPods were everywhere. “It took off like a rocket,” said Mr. Rubinstein.

Still, Mr. Jobs pushed Apple to make the iPod smaller and more powerful. Mr. Rubinstein said the company has halted production of its most popular product ever, the iPod Mini, to replace it with a slimmer version called the Nano, which starts at $200. Nano helped the company nearly double its unit sales to 40 million next year.

Perhaps the iPod’s most important contribution was its catalyst for the creation of the iPhone. As cell phone manufacturers began to introduce devices that could play music, Apple executives worried about getting ahead of better technology. Mr. Jobs decided that if that was going to happen, Apple had to do it.

The iPhone continued to benefit from the mix of software and services that made the iPod successful. The success of iTunes, which allows customers to back up their iPhones and put music on the device, has been mirrored by the development of the App Store, which allows people to download and pay for software and services.

In 2007, the company gave up its long-time corporate moniker Apple Computer Inc. and became Apple, a six-year-old electronics juggernaut.

“They showed the world that they had an atomic bomb and five years later they had a nuclear arsenal,” said Talal Shamoon, CEO of Intertrust Technologies, a digital rights management company that worked with the music industry at the time. “After that, there was not the slightest doubt that Apple would own everyone.”



Source link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

(0)