May 11, 2022 • 38 mins
On May 10th, 2022, Apple announced it was discontinuing the iPod Touch, the last in the line of iPod products. We look back on the debut, evolution and impact of the iconic iPod.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Be there and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive reducer with I Heart Radio
and how the tech are Young. Now, Normally on a Wednesday,
I would attempt to bring to you a tech Stuff
Tidbits episode, which is ostensibly supposed to be a shorter episode,
(00:29):
but we all know how that goes when you got
chatty Cathy over here yapping into the microphone. But today
I'm just going to abandon all hope of this being
tid bit ish. And that's because yesterday that being made
tenth two thousand twenty two, Apple brought an end to
an era. The company announced that it was discontinuing the
(00:53):
iPod Touch, which is the last model in the iPod
line to be made. All the others have already been retired.
So the iPod was a transformational technology, and now iPod
as a brand is going away. In fact, we get
the term podcasting from the iPod. Now, the iPod was
(01:17):
not the first MP three player, but it was the
model that brought that technology into the mainstream. And moreover,
the iPod played a pivotal role in turning Apple's fortunes around.
It's pretty easy for us to forget these days that
just a couple of decades ago, the multi trillion dollar
company that is Apple today back then was on the
(01:40):
verge of collapse. So I thought we could do a
quick rundown of the history of the iPod and why
I argue it is one of the most important technologies
to emerge, specifically for me to get real selfish and
egotistical about it, but one of the most technologies to
(02:00):
emerge over the last couple of decades. Uh. And I
think this dovetails nicely with Monday's episode about dr M disasters.
In that episode, I talked about how Apple, under pressure
from music labels, included DRM or digital rights management on
digital files, that is, songs and albums that it sold
(02:21):
through its iTunes music store. A few years later, Apple
would be the company that was able to dictate its
own terms because the tables had turned. And that's how
much things changed in just a few years. The glove
was on the other foot. I might be getting turned around. Anyway.
Let's let's roll back the clock a bit. As I said,
(02:42):
the iPod was not the first MP three player, and
it definitely wasn't the first digital music player. There was
a British inventor named Kane Kramer who came up with
the idea for a digital music player way back in
the late nineteen seventies. He filed a patent for his design,
which he called the I X I or X or
(03:05):
maybe it's supposed to be Roman numerals, but anyway, he
he filed a patent for it in ninete and he
received a patent in Because these things take time, that
that device was capable of holding about three and a
half minutes of audio, which would be about one and
a half Ramons songs or the bit in a meat
Loaf song just before meat Loaf starts to sing. Anyway,
(03:28):
three and a half minutes is hardly useful. Digital audio
files were really big and storage was really limited. That
combo just meant that the digital audio player technology wasn't
quite ready for prime time, which is putting it lightly.
Skip ahead to the early nineteen nineties and the emergence
(03:49):
of the MP three file format. I did a whole
episode about the creation and evolution of MP three's, so
this is just going to be a short version of
that story. So the MP three format could compress audio
files down to a more manageable size. The format does
this by getting rid of information that's in the file. Ideally,
(04:13):
it's information that doesn't impact the experience of listening to
the audio. There's an entire psycho acoustic side to the
MP three technology that's all about determining what would be
perceivable or perceptible and what would not, and you just
get rid of all the stuff that isn't. The idea
(04:34):
being that if a human is incapable of hearing a
particular sound, there's no reason to include that information in
the compressed file. Now, of course, you can encode m
P three's so that they are more or less aggressive
in their approach to compressing file sizes. The more aggressive
you get, the smaller the compressed file will be, but
(04:56):
the worst it will sound. So this is a lossy
file format. But if you go easy with your compression,
then the file size it won't shrink down as much,
but the fidelity the quality of the audio will be better. Anyway,
the MP three format made audio files more practical for
(05:17):
you know, the average person, like whether you wanted to
just have them on your computer or potentially transfer them,
say over the internet, by the late nineties, there were
a couple of companies that were experimenting with digital audio
players that could play MP three files. See before that
the really the only way to enjoy MP three's was
(05:38):
to listen to them on a computer. Eventually, you did
have some CD player manufacturers that started to produce compact
disc players that could read MP three compact discs. So
in those cases, you could burn a CD with you know,
more than a hundred songs on it in MP three format,
so they're not being burned in the the the raw
(06:00):
audio files that you would use to digitally imprint CDs. Instead,
you're you're just burning MP three files to the CD.
But those weren't commonplace, and there certainly weren't very many
portable solutions around until the two thousand's, so it just
was not a very convenient form factor yet. Then you
(06:23):
had a couple of companies like Elgar Labs that started
to introduce digital audio players that could play m P three's.
Uh the Elgar Labs one was the mp man F ten.
I'm guessing they were kind of naming their products so
it was kind of similar to Sony's Walkman trademark, and
the F ten had thirty two whole megabytes of memory,
(06:43):
and it cost two hundred fifty dollars. There was also
the Diamond Rio p MP three hundred, which was more popular.
It also only had thirty two megabytes of storage. It
hit the market not long after the F ten did.
And please keep in mind that these play years didn't
have native connectivity on them. You could not download music
(07:05):
directly to the device. You could not stream anything to
the device. Instead, you would have to use software on
your computer to manage your music library. Then you would
transfer songs from your computer to your MP three player
using a physical cable that connected the two. This would
be true for early iPods as well, In fact, true
(07:27):
for everything up to and including the iPod Touch, at
least in the early stages. The p MP three in
particular helped start to churn up interest in the MP
three format, right Like, there were geeks like me who
were interested in MP three's back then. But once you
got to a player that could actually store and play
(07:48):
that stuff on its own and you could carry it
around with you, that's when MP three's really started to
gain some traction. That's also when the music industry really
got involved. The recording Industry Association of America or r
I double A sued real Port, which was in charge
of making RIO and the software used to manage the RIO,
(08:13):
because there was a general fear that folks would start
buying compact discs, rip music from the c d s,
and then share that music online without you know, everyone
going through the proper process of forking cash over to
the music labels, and the r I double A lost
that lawsuit. The court said, no, the existence of this
(08:34):
saying does not automatically mean what you say. It means.
They're certainly not liable for people taking that that path.
People might, but it's not the fault of the company
for that, and MP three players and the software needed
to transfer music from PCs two MP three players were
(08:57):
deemed to be totally legal. It turned out the r
I double A was kind of on point with its fears,
even if it didn't have legal grounds to stop in
P three players, because people did start to share music online,
and then once the peer to peer network technology began
to emerge, it really took off. It became pretty easy
to distribute music files across lots of computers. So this
(09:19):
was the birth of napster. In n and the music
labels went banana. A downturn and media sales sent a
shock way through the music industry, and they went nuclear
on Napster and its users. Now on the MP three
player side, developments began to push the technology forward. The
remote solutions Personal jukebox MP three player did a big
(09:42):
leap frog over earlier devices because it actually included a
small hard drive from a laptop as its storage device,
and that pushed the jukebox's capacity to four point eight gigabytes,
which was leagues better than that thirty two megabyte limitation
of the earliest MP three players. But generally speaking, these
(10:04):
MP three players were bulky, They were not really attractive.
The ones with hard drives were also very heavy and
delicate because hard drives have moving mechanical components and if
you were to say, drop your MP three player, you
could damage those mechanical components and it wouldn't work anymore.
And again, they weren't really stylish and they were really expensive.
(10:27):
But Steve Jobs had an idea to change all that.
I'll explain more when we come back after this quick break. Okay,
so I had set the stage for the early days
of the MP three player Steve Jobs was in charge
(10:48):
of Apple at this time, and you know he had
been a co founder of Apple. He essentially got for
style of the company, or essentially pushed aside enough so
that he left the company all depends on which account
you listened to, then ultimately came back to rescue the
company when it was on the verge of financial collapse.
(11:08):
He saw the potential of the MP three player space,
but the devices on the market lacked style, they lacked utility.
No one was knocking it out of the park. The
existing ones were just too big and bulky, and they
were too ugly. And there were early adopter types who
met the Venn diagram overlap of computer nerd and music
(11:29):
nerd who were buying some of those early MP three players,
But most MP three players just weren't user friendly enough
or attractive enough to hit mainstream success. So Jobs goes
to his senior VP of Industrial Design, Johnny I've, who
was not yet a knight of the realm at this time.
He is Sir Jonathan I've now, and Jobs laid out
(11:52):
what he wanted. He wanted definitive MP three player that
the average person would want to buy. It had to attractive,
it had to be useful, it had to hold enough
music to make it worthwhile, and this could really be
Apple's next big thing. It took Johnny i'ves team a
(12:13):
little less than a year to design, prototype, and finalize
the first iPod, which Jobs himself with debut to a
small crowd on October twenty three, two thousand one, and
Jobs knew he had to win some skeptics over because
this was a brand new business that Apple was getting into.
So before unveiling the device itself, he explained that Apple
(12:34):
was getting into this industry because quote, music is a
part of everyone's life end quote. He made a business
case for Apple to get into the MP three player business.
He said, it's not a speculative business. This isn't something
where we're placing a bet. This is a sure thing.
Music is important for everyone, and so all he had
(12:59):
to do is in at the history of the music
industry and say there's your proof. So he was really
dismantling criticisms before they could even be formed, which was
pretty genius. He was also, by the way, totally right.
So Jobs argued that there was no established leader in
the digital music player space. He called out a couple
of companies. He called out Creative, which made a model
(13:22):
called the Zen. Actually owned a Creative Zen way back
in the day, and he said, well, that one has
had some success, but still a very small company. It
can't produce these things at scale. Then you had Sony,
which was a very very large company, but it had
failed to produce a device that was a hit with consumers.
(13:44):
So Jobs was saying this gave Apple the opportunity to
swoop in and take the lead spot in a blossoming market.
And he said that the iPod, the new Apple music device,
could play the four most popular digital formats for music
at the time, which were MP three, MP three VBR,
(14:06):
Wave or w A V and ai F F H.
The wave and ai F formats were for uncompressed audio,
wave being essentially developed for Microsoft machines, and ai F
being an Apple development. That means you you end up
with better sound quality, but the file sizes are much larger,
(14:26):
so you're able to store fewer files on your device. Now.
The original iPod featured a digital screen and had a
mechanical wheel to scroll through options and song choices. That
mechanical wheel was flush with the front of the the
iPods face so in other words, you would put your
thumb on the surface of this wheel and rotate the
(14:49):
wheel around in order to scroll through a menu or
through your music's collection. It had a five gigabyte hard drive,
which Job said was capable of holding up to one
thou and songs, although he said like for most people,
that would be their entire music library, so you could
just have your whole library in your pocket. He also
said those one thousand songs could be encoded at a
(15:12):
bit rate of a hundred sixty kilobits. The hard drive
in the original iPod had a platter that measured just
one point eight inches in diameter and was point two
inches thick, so very very thin. The iPod itself measured
four inches tall, two point four inches wide, and was
point seven eight inches thick. It was, as Jobs put it,
(15:35):
the size of a deck of cards. Now I realized
I mentioned just a second ago bit rate and I
didn't really clarify what that was. But I do plan
on doing a Tidbits episode in the near future to
explain sample rate and bit rate for digital audio. Those
two factors play an important part in how large an
audio file is and the audio quality of that file.
(15:58):
But I didn't want to take up all of this
episode to talk about it, so let's get back to
the iPod now. To connect the iPod to a computer,
which originally was just limited to Mac computers, Apple built
in a FireWire port on the iPod. Jobs said it
would take ten seconds to load a CDs worth of
music onto the iPod, compared to five minutes if you
(16:22):
were using an old USB cable between a computer and
an MP three player. He also said it could take
up to ten minutes to transfer the full one thousand
songs to an iPod, but it would take five hours
if you wanted to do the same with USB, so
he was really touting the superiority of FireWire over USB
at the time. Jobs also said that the iPods battery
(16:45):
would supply ten hours of continuous play, and that it
would have fast charge capability to regain eighty percent of
its capacity in one hour of charging, and that the
FireWire cable would provide not just data transfer, but also
provide power, so you could plug your iPod into your
computer using the FireWire cable and you could charge your
(17:08):
iPod while you're also transferring music to it, and all
this for the low, low price of three dollars. If
we were to adjust for inflation today, that would be
about the same as six hundred fifty bucks yells them. Now,
by the time Apple unveiled the iPod, the company had
(17:29):
already launched iTunes. They launched iTunes at the beginning of
two thousand one, and the iPod was announced in October
of that year. Now, at that time, iTunes was strictly
a digital music management program. You could put a CD
into a Mac and you could rip music from that
c D and make digital files of it and use
(17:51):
iTunes to organize your music collection, but it would live
on your computer. iTunes would then become the software component
to manage iPods, at least on max, and connecting an
iPod to your computer with iTunes would allow for automatic synchronization.
So if you had added new music to your computer, well,
the next time you plug your iPod in, those new
(18:13):
tracks could transition seamlessly to your iPod, so you'd have
them ready for when you're on the go. The iPod
was a pretty big departure for Apple, and it was
a success. You know, Apple had experimented with some uh
consumer electronics outside of computers a bit in the past
(18:34):
and had had let's say, mixed success. The Newton is
a an infamous flop for Apple, right, but the iPod
was not a flop, and the following year, in two
thousand two, Apple updated the iPod. It would ultimately offer
two models of the iPod, one that had a ten
gigabyte hard drive, so twice of the size of the original,
(18:57):
and the second would have a twenty gigabyte hard drive.
They also replaced the old mechanical scroll wheel, so you
no longer had a wheel that you could physically turn
around on the face of this iPod, and they replaced
it with a capacitive sensing touch wheel, so kind of
like a touch screen in a sense, except it wasn't
a screen. It was just this round, rounded section of
(19:20):
the surface of the iPod, so you are no longer
physically turning a wheel to scroll through stuff. The new
iPods were also compatible with Windows PCs, which dramatically expanded
the potential customer base for Apple in the process. Now,
at the time, there was no iTunes for PC for
for Windows, so PC users had to rely on software
(19:42):
called Music Match Jukebox in order to organize their music
collections and send music over to their iPods. The new
iPod also had a thirty pin dock connector, and then
you could use a dock that had FireWire or a
dock that had USB. That was good because FireWire was
(20:03):
pretty much unheard of on Windows PCs. There were some
that had FireWire reports, but it was not a standard.
It was far more common to run into USB connections.
In two thousand three, Apple introduced iTunes for Windows and
thus migrated away from Music Match, Jukebox and UM. iTunes
(20:25):
for Windows was pants, meaning it was not good, at
least in my opinion, at least back in those days.
It felt bloated and unwieldy. It had massive processor demands.
It took up too much of your computer memory. At
least in my experience, I really didn't like using it.
(20:46):
I'm sure I would have felt differently if I had
owned a Mac computer instead of a Windows PC, but
on Windows it was a shore. Oh. In two thousand
three was also when Apple launched the iTunes music store,
that that you could actually purchase digital music directly from Apple,
rather than rip it from c D s uh. That
(21:07):
was the other way you could really get music. There
were some other independent and and studio owned digital music
stores out there, but none of them had really taken
off in popularity. And of course there was the black
market piracy trading culture out there. Napster was gone by
(21:29):
two thousand three. It had been sued out of existence.
But it's not like piracy just went away after that.
But this is when Apple introduced the legit iTunes music store.
It's also when Apple would introduce the fair Play Digital
Rights Management or DRM solution, which restricted iTunes purchases to
play only on authorized devices. So this was again back
(21:52):
when music labels had a lot of leverage over Apple.
All Right, we've got a lot more to get through
with the evil of the iPod and its eventual demise.
But before we get into any of that, let's take
another quick break. Okay, we're up to two thousand four.
(22:16):
That's when Apple would expand iPod line again. So earlier
years had seen iPods with you know, larger hard drive
sizes and that kind of thing, like modest improvements, but
two thousand four saw entirely new iPod models. Apple introduced
the iPod many in two thousand four, and as the
name suggests, it was significantly smaller than the standard iPod
(22:40):
and it had a hard drive that could hold up
to one thousand songs, similar to the original iPod. Apple
also introduced the iPod Photo, which was an iPod with
a color digital screen that could display photos on it. Obviously,
you would transfer the photos from your computer to your iPod,
you could scroll through them, and there was also a
fourth generation standard iPod as well. Two thousand four was
(23:04):
also when the term podcasting began to catch on. Now,
the practice had been around for a while, right There
had already been cases of serialized digital audio content that
people could subscribe to that dated back a few years
from before two thousand four, But two thousand four was
(23:25):
where podcasting as a word really emerged. I would argue
that that really drove home how Apple had nailed the
MP three player technology and the marketing for digital audio
players because it had become the de facto leader in
the space and had to find the technology. You know,
(23:47):
it didn't it didn't invent it, but they refined it
to a point where that was the standard, so much
so that an entire medium was named after the iPod podcasting.
Then in two thousand five, we got the iPod Nano,
which was an even smaller iPod than the iPod Mini.
(24:08):
It used flash storage rather than a hard drive, and
in the early days of digital audio players, flash storage
was a real limitter and it was really expensive. It
couldn't hold very much, and it cost a lot to produce.
That's why Apple chose to go with physical hard drives
for its early iPods. But by two thousand five, the
(24:29):
capacity was starting to go up and the price was
starting to come down, so the Nano was available in
two gigabyte and four gigabyte capacity models. It had a
color screen, and it was smaller than the iPod Mini was,
which in turn was smaller than the standard iPod. A
few months after it debuted, the Nano would replace the
(24:49):
Mini and Apple would just discontinue the Mini model entirely. Also,
two thousand five was when the iPod Shuffle came out.
The iPod Shuffle h is an odd little thing. Most
models don't have any display at all. Uh In fact,
it has a pretty simple interface. It's got a power button,
a play pause button, and controls that allow you to
(25:12):
change the volume and skip a song or go back
to a song. And the Shuffle could play songs you know,
in whatever order was organized on the device, or as
the name suggests it could shuffle them randomly, so the
shovel was even smaller than the nano. It maxed out
with a one gigabyte hard drive model when it launched,
(25:34):
or I guess I should say flash drive model one
gigabyte of storage when it launched. Also in two thousand five,
Apple introduced a fifth generation iPod that was capable of
playing video. So now we're at the point where you
could transfer video files to a an iPod, which otherwise
was modeled like the classic iPod, and you can watch
(25:55):
those videos whenever you wanted. Where still in that where
you had to physically connect your iPod with your your
computer in order to synchronize files between the devices and
to transfer new material to the iPods. So it's not
like you could just download videos natively to the device.
You still had to connect it physically to your computer
(26:16):
to do that. And finally, two thousand five, finally, for
two thousand five, anyway, it was a critical year for
my profession. See that's the year that Steve Jobs announced
that podcasts would be incorporated directly into iTunes, so iTunes
users would be able to subscribe to podcasts and whenever
(26:37):
they synchronize their iPods with their computers, any new episodes
of the shows they subscribed to would automatically transfer to
their iPod, and Apple took podcasting, which at that time
was still a very young medium, and they pushed it
further toward the mainstream. The success of the iPod in
no small way contributed to the early growth of podcasts,
(27:00):
though it would take more than a decade for podcasts
to become popular enough so that the average person knew
what the heck a podcast was. Occasionally I still run
into people who aren't sure what a podcast is, but
it's it's more rare these days now. The joke is
everybody has a podcast. Back then, most people didn't even
know what the heck podcast was. And it also became
(27:22):
true pretty quickly that if you wanted your podcast to
do well, you really had to hold out hope that
Apple was going to feature your podcast on its podcast page,
because that pretty much guaranteed you would see a rush
of new subscribers. Some of the shows on our network,
such as Stuff You Should Know, benefited tremendously due to
(27:43):
Apple featuring the podcast on the iTunes podcast section. Now,
I also have to point out that if it weren't
for the fact that Stuff You Should Know is just
a really great show with incredibly talented hosts. It wouldn't
matter for all the promotion in the world, right, It
wouldn't make a difference. If the show was terrible, people
wouldn't stay subscribed to it. So I don't want to
(28:06):
take any credit away from the creators. They are legitimately
great at what they do, but the iTunes promotion helped
them out considerably in the early days to get a
big following. Now, two thousand six was less eventful than
two thousand five. Apple released updated generations for the iPod
(28:27):
and the Nano and the Shuffle. Nothing really spectacular to
note here. The new models were obviously improvements over previous generations,
but that was pretty much it. But then in two
thousand seven we got two things that would be huge
for Apple now. The really big one was the iPhone.
By this time, Apple's image had really skyrocketed. The popularity
(28:50):
of the iPod had truly transformed the company, and the
iPhone would push Apple beyond the stratosphere and into lower
th orbit at least. But that same year Apple also
introduced the iPod Touch. The Touch was essentially an iPhone
without the phone part. There was no cellular antenna in
(29:12):
the iPod Touch, but it featured the same multi touch
screen as the iPhone. Most of the internal components were
the same. They would have a camera had it was
able to run apps, at least apps that didn't require
a cellular connection, so in many ways it was like
an iPhone, just without the phone part. And the iPod
Touch also had WiFi connectivity, so you could use an
(29:34):
iPod Touch to browse the web or message people, and
you could even purchase digital music wirelessly. You still couldn't
synchronize wirelessly. That would come a little bit later. Apple
still offered the original iPod form factor. I mean not
the original original, because we're not talking about a mechanical
scroll wheel or anything, but the the form factor that
(29:56):
we associate with the old school iPods, and from that
point for at Apple would refer to those types of
iPods as the iPod Classic. By the end of two
thousand seven, Apple had sold more than a hundred forty
million iPods. Like I said, the iPod line transformed Apple,
but the iPhone was going to be way more disruptive. Now.
(30:18):
Over the following years, Apple would continue to evolve the Nano,
the Shuffle, and the Touch iPod lines. It would continue
to support the classic line, but those really didn't change
too much year to year. In two thousand eight, Apple
added a feature that let you play a random song
on your nano's playlist if you just shook your nano.
(30:40):
I really wonder how many nano's perished as people over
enthusiastically tried to search for a cool random song. In
Apple changed the nano design. It used to be kind
of like a thin rectangle. It was much taller than
it was wide, but the model turned the Nano into
a square. It kind of looks like the watch face
(31:02):
of an Apple Watch. In fact, the fourth generation iPod
Touch would have a retina display, so that was a
very high definition display capable of sharp, vibrant graphics. It
could also shoot HD photos and videos, and it was
the first iPod Touch to have a front facing camera,
which meant you could actually use the iPod Touch to
(31:24):
make FaceTime calls over WiFi. The fourth generation Touch would
also get a further update that would allow for wireless
synchronization with iTunes, so now you no longer had to
dock your Touch to your computer to synchronize across the
two devices. The fifth generation Touch got a larger screen
(31:46):
and a lightning DOC connector, which allowed for even faster
data transfer speeds. And during this time, Apple continued to
support the iPod Classic models, but the company would ultimately
discontinue those in stept Tober two thousand fourteen. The iPod
Shuffle and the iPod Nano would get the same treatment
in two thousand seventeen. Now, the reason I'm skipping over
(32:10):
all that, like I'm going from essentially two thousand eight
to two thousand four to two thousand seventeen, is because
the evolution of the devices were the kind of gradual
like they weren't. They weren't monumental leaps, and it would
be ridiculous just to go from year to year and say,
(32:30):
and here's where these minor changes came into play. But
now five years later, in two Apple is saying goodbye
to the Touch. And you might wonder why why is
Apple sunsetting the iPod line entirely, Well, it really has
to do with that pesky iPhone you see, as as
the iPhones battery life and storage capacity and then ultimately
(32:53):
access to streaming music services increased the demand for a
standalone music playback device decreased. The Touch held out longer
than the others because it was essentially a cheaper iPhone
just without the cellular phone part. You could even do
WiFi style calls on a Touch. In fact, my buddy
I as Actor, used an iPod Touch as his mobile
(33:16):
phone for a short while. I remember him telling me
about that at c E S and it blew my mind. Now,
if you look at how much iPods have contributed to
Apple's revenue, you would see that they really hit their
peak in two thousand six, not peak sales. They didn't
hit their peak sales till two thousand and eight, But
(33:36):
in two thousand six they contributed the most by percentage
to Apple's overall revenue. In two thousand six, they were
about of all of Apple's revenue, it just came from
iPod sales. So so nearly half of all of Apple's
revenue came from selling iPods in two thousand six. See,
(33:59):
I told you that I pod really turned things around
for Apple. Now, actual iPod sales, like I said, they
peaked in two thousand eight, So they sold more iPods
in two thousand eight than they did in two thousand six,
they sold fifty four point eight million units. Back in
two thousand six, they had sold thirty nine point four million.
(34:19):
But in two thousand eight, even though they sold more iPods,
those sales accounted for just tw Apple's revenue. And remember
in two thousand six it was of Apple's revenue. That
tells you a lot right there. Right If a company
sells fifteen million more units two years later, but those
(34:40):
sales contribute a smaller amount to the company's total revenue,
something else is really taking off. That's something else was
the iPhone. So the iPod was still a mega success,
but the iPhone was leaving it in the dust. From
two thousand eight, it was a downward trend. Now, it's
not like iPod sales inanked immediately, but in two thousand
(35:02):
nine it dipped from fifty four point eight million units
to fifty four point one million units, and at that
point the sales were accounting for around nineteen percent of
the company's total revenue, because again, the iPhone was just
a monster. By two thousand fourteen, the sales numbers were
down to fourteen point four million units and accounted for
(35:26):
about one percent of the total revenue for Apple. Now,
after two thousand fourteen, Apple would just lump in iPod
sales with other categories, so it became impossible to see
how iPod sales and revenue were going. The iPhone had
really eclipsed everything else, so it's not really a surprise
that the iPod touch is going away, or that the
(35:49):
iPod line in general is riding off into the sunset.
Some folks like yours truly held out for a really
long time and carried both an MP three player, and yes,
I eventually abandoned my creative zen for an iPod Classic
and also carried a smartphone at the same time. I
(36:09):
was one of those people. I had two devices. That
was because I didn't want to run down my phone's
battery while playing music, nor did I want to fill
up my phone's storage within an enormous music collection. Because
streaming services really were a thing yet at least not
a common thing. But eventually streaming services increased capacity and
(36:32):
better battery life all made standalone MP three players kind
of obsolete because smartphones could do it all. They could
act as your music library and a streaming platform and
a phone and a computer. There was no reason to
have to carry two of them. Apple is going to
sell off all remaining iPod touches that are in stock
(36:55):
and then puff they'll be gone. So if you want one,
now's the time to buy one before they all end
up on the aftermarket at ridiculously pumped up prices that
they are just not worth that they range in price
from about hundred ninety nine dollars for a thirty two
gigabyte model up to three dollars for a two hundred
(37:17):
fifty six gigabyte model. There are a few different colors available,
though not every color of iPod Touch has all the
different storage capacities available. Some of them are already out
of stock, and like I said, once the rest are gone,
that's it. So farewell iPod. You set Apple on a
(37:39):
trajectory to become one of the most powerful companies in
the world, and you lent your name to an art
form that has become my career. Plus, even though I
am an Android smartphone user and I used to own
a creative Zen MP three player, I do have to
admit that the iPod form factor and its performance were
top notch. Just wish that darn iTunes software had worked
(38:02):
better on Windows. That's it for this episode of Tech Stuff.
If you have suggestions for topics I should tackle in
future episodes, please reach out to me. The best way
to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the
show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk
to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I
(38:28):
Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Be there and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive reducer with I Heart Radio
and how the tech are Young. Now, Normally on a Wednesday,
I would attempt to bring to you a tech Stuff
Tidbits episode, which is ostensibly supposed to be a shorter episode,
(00:29):
but we all know how that goes when you got
chatty Cathy over here yapping into the microphone. But today
I'm just going to abandon all hope of this being
tid bit ish. And that's because yesterday that being made
tenth two thousand twenty two, Apple brought an end to
an era. The company announced that it was discontinuing the
(00:53):
iPod Touch, which is the last model in the iPod
line to be made. All the others have already been retired.
So the iPod was a transformational technology, and now iPod
as a brand is going away. In fact, we get
the term podcasting from the iPod. Now, the iPod was
(01:17):
not the first MP three player, but it was the
model that brought that technology into the mainstream. And moreover,
the iPod played a pivotal role in turning Apple's fortunes around.
It's pretty easy for us to forget these days that
just a couple of decades ago, the multi trillion dollar
company that is Apple today back then was on the
(01:40):
verge of collapse. So I thought we could do a
quick rundown of the history of the iPod and why
I argue it is one of the most important technologies
to emerge, specifically for me to get real selfish and
egotistical about it, but one of the most technologies to
(02:00):
emerge over the last couple of decades. Uh. And I
think this dovetails nicely with Monday's episode about dr M disasters.
In that episode, I talked about how Apple, under pressure
from music labels, included DRM or digital rights management on
digital files, that is, songs and albums that it sold
(02:21):
through its iTunes music store. A few years later, Apple
would be the company that was able to dictate its
own terms because the tables had turned. And that's how
much things changed in just a few years. The glove
was on the other foot. I might be getting turned around. Anyway.
Let's let's roll back the clock a bit. As I said,
(02:42):
the iPod was not the first MP three player, and
it definitely wasn't the first digital music player. There was
a British inventor named Kane Kramer who came up with
the idea for a digital music player way back in
the late nineteen seventies. He filed a patent for his design,
which he called the I X I or X or
(03:05):
maybe it's supposed to be Roman numerals, but anyway, he
he filed a patent for it in ninete and he
received a patent in Because these things take time, that
that device was capable of holding about three and a
half minutes of audio, which would be about one and
a half Ramons songs or the bit in a meat
Loaf song just before meat Loaf starts to sing. Anyway,
(03:28):
three and a half minutes is hardly useful. Digital audio
files were really big and storage was really limited. That
combo just meant that the digital audio player technology wasn't
quite ready for prime time, which is putting it lightly.
Skip ahead to the early nineteen nineties and the emergence
(03:49):
of the MP three file format. I did a whole
episode about the creation and evolution of MP three's, so
this is just going to be a short version of
that story. So the MP three format could compress audio
files down to a more manageable size. The format does
this by getting rid of information that's in the file. Ideally,
(04:13):
it's information that doesn't impact the experience of listening to
the audio. There's an entire psycho acoustic side to the
MP three technology that's all about determining what would be
perceivable or perceptible and what would not, and you just
get rid of all the stuff that isn't. The idea
(04:34):
being that if a human is incapable of hearing a
particular sound, there's no reason to include that information in
the compressed file. Now, of course, you can encode m
P three's so that they are more or less aggressive
in their approach to compressing file sizes. The more aggressive
you get, the smaller the compressed file will be, but
(04:56):
the worst it will sound. So this is a lossy
file format. But if you go easy with your compression,
then the file size it won't shrink down as much,
but the fidelity the quality of the audio will be better. Anyway,
the MP three format made audio files more practical for
(05:17):
you know, the average person, like whether you wanted to
just have them on your computer or potentially transfer them,
say over the internet, by the late nineties, there were
a couple of companies that were experimenting with digital audio
players that could play MP three files. See before that
the really the only way to enjoy MP three's was
(05:38):
to listen to them on a computer. Eventually, you did
have some CD player manufacturers that started to produce compact
disc players that could read MP three compact discs. So
in those cases, you could burn a CD with you know,
more than a hundred songs on it in MP three format,
so they're not being burned in the the the raw
(06:00):
audio files that you would use to digitally imprint CDs. Instead,
you're you're just burning MP three files to the CD.
But those weren't commonplace, and there certainly weren't very many
portable solutions around until the two thousand's, so it just
was not a very convenient form factor yet. Then you
(06:23):
had a couple of companies like Elgar Labs that started
to introduce digital audio players that could play m P three's.
Uh the Elgar Labs one was the mp man F ten.
I'm guessing they were kind of naming their products so
it was kind of similar to Sony's Walkman trademark, and
the F ten had thirty two whole megabytes of memory,
(06:43):
and it cost two hundred fifty dollars. There was also
the Diamond Rio p MP three hundred, which was more popular.
It also only had thirty two megabytes of storage. It
hit the market not long after the F ten did.
And please keep in mind that these play years didn't
have native connectivity on them. You could not download music
(07:05):
directly to the device. You could not stream anything to
the device. Instead, you would have to use software on
your computer to manage your music library. Then you would
transfer songs from your computer to your MP three player
using a physical cable that connected the two. This would
be true for early iPods as well, In fact, true
(07:27):
for everything up to and including the iPod Touch, at
least in the early stages. The p MP three in
particular helped start to churn up interest in the MP
three format, right Like, there were geeks like me who
were interested in MP three's back then. But once you
got to a player that could actually store and play
(07:48):
that stuff on its own and you could carry it
around with you, that's when MP three's really started to
gain some traction. That's also when the music industry really
got involved. The recording Industry Association of America or r
I double A sued real Port, which was in charge
of making RIO and the software used to manage the RIO,
(08:13):
because there was a general fear that folks would start
buying compact discs, rip music from the c d s,
and then share that music online without you know, everyone
going through the proper process of forking cash over to
the music labels, and the r I double A lost
that lawsuit. The court said, no, the existence of this
(08:34):
saying does not automatically mean what you say. It means.
They're certainly not liable for people taking that that path.
People might, but it's not the fault of the company
for that, and MP three players and the software needed
to transfer music from PCs two MP three players were
(08:57):
deemed to be totally legal. It turned out the r
I double A was kind of on point with its fears,
even if it didn't have legal grounds to stop in
P three players, because people did start to share music online,
and then once the peer to peer network technology began
to emerge, it really took off. It became pretty easy
to distribute music files across lots of computers. So this
(09:19):
was the birth of napster. In n and the music
labels went banana. A downturn and media sales sent a
shock way through the music industry, and they went nuclear
on Napster and its users. Now on the MP three
player side, developments began to push the technology forward. The
remote solutions Personal jukebox MP three player did a big
(09:42):
leap frog over earlier devices because it actually included a
small hard drive from a laptop as its storage device,
and that pushed the jukebox's capacity to four point eight gigabytes,
which was leagues better than that thirty two megabyte limitation
of the earliest MP three players. But generally speaking, these
(10:04):
MP three players were bulky, They were not really attractive.
The ones with hard drives were also very heavy and
delicate because hard drives have moving mechanical components and if
you were to say, drop your MP three player, you
could damage those mechanical components and it wouldn't work anymore.
And again, they weren't really stylish and they were really expensive.
(10:27):
But Steve Jobs had an idea to change all that.
I'll explain more when we come back after this quick break. Okay,
so I had set the stage for the early days
of the MP three player Steve Jobs was in charge
(10:48):
of Apple at this time, and you know he had
been a co founder of Apple. He essentially got for
style of the company, or essentially pushed aside enough so
that he left the company all depends on which account
you listened to, then ultimately came back to rescue the
company when it was on the verge of financial collapse.
(11:08):
He saw the potential of the MP three player space,
but the devices on the market lacked style, they lacked utility.
No one was knocking it out of the park. The
existing ones were just too big and bulky, and they
were too ugly. And there were early adopter types who
met the Venn diagram overlap of computer nerd and music
(11:29):
nerd who were buying some of those early MP three players,
But most MP three players just weren't user friendly enough
or attractive enough to hit mainstream success. So Jobs goes
to his senior VP of Industrial Design, Johnny I've, who
was not yet a knight of the realm at this time.
He is Sir Jonathan I've now, and Jobs laid out
(11:52):
what he wanted. He wanted definitive MP three player that
the average person would want to buy. It had to attractive,
it had to be useful, it had to hold enough
music to make it worthwhile, and this could really be
Apple's next big thing. It took Johnny i'ves team a
(12:13):
little less than a year to design, prototype, and finalize
the first iPod, which Jobs himself with debut to a
small crowd on October twenty three, two thousand one, and
Jobs knew he had to win some skeptics over because
this was a brand new business that Apple was getting into.
So before unveiling the device itself, he explained that Apple
(12:34):
was getting into this industry because quote, music is a
part of everyone's life end quote. He made a business
case for Apple to get into the MP three player business.
He said, it's not a speculative business. This isn't something
where we're placing a bet. This is a sure thing.
Music is important for everyone, and so all he had
(12:59):
to do is in at the history of the music
industry and say there's your proof. So he was really
dismantling criticisms before they could even be formed, which was
pretty genius. He was also, by the way, totally right.
So Jobs argued that there was no established leader in
the digital music player space. He called out a couple
of companies. He called out Creative, which made a model
(13:22):
called the Zen. Actually owned a Creative Zen way back
in the day, and he said, well, that one has
had some success, but still a very small company. It
can't produce these things at scale. Then you had Sony,
which was a very very large company, but it had
failed to produce a device that was a hit with consumers.
(13:44):
So Jobs was saying this gave Apple the opportunity to
swoop in and take the lead spot in a blossoming market.
And he said that the iPod, the new Apple music device,
could play the four most popular digital formats for music
at the time, which were MP three, MP three VBR,
(14:06):
Wave or w A V and ai F F H.
The wave and ai F formats were for uncompressed audio,
wave being essentially developed for Microsoft machines, and ai F
being an Apple development. That means you you end up
with better sound quality, but the file sizes are much larger,
(14:26):
so you're able to store fewer files on your device. Now.
The original iPod featured a digital screen and had a
mechanical wheel to scroll through options and song choices. That
mechanical wheel was flush with the front of the the
iPods face so in other words, you would put your
thumb on the surface of this wheel and rotate the
(14:49):
wheel around in order to scroll through a menu or
through your music's collection. It had a five gigabyte hard drive,
which Job said was capable of holding up to one
thou and songs, although he said like for most people,
that would be their entire music library, so you could
just have your whole library in your pocket. He also
said those one thousand songs could be encoded at a
(15:12):
bit rate of a hundred sixty kilobits. The hard drive
in the original iPod had a platter that measured just
one point eight inches in diameter and was point two
inches thick, so very very thin. The iPod itself measured
four inches tall, two point four inches wide, and was
point seven eight inches thick. It was, as Jobs put it,
(15:35):
the size of a deck of cards. Now I realized
I mentioned just a second ago bit rate and I
didn't really clarify what that was. But I do plan
on doing a Tidbits episode in the near future to
explain sample rate and bit rate for digital audio. Those
two factors play an important part in how large an
audio file is and the audio quality of that file.
(15:58):
But I didn't want to take up all of this
episode to talk about it, so let's get back to
the iPod now. To connect the iPod to a computer,
which originally was just limited to Mac computers, Apple built
in a FireWire port on the iPod. Jobs said it
would take ten seconds to load a CDs worth of
music onto the iPod, compared to five minutes if you
(16:22):
were using an old USB cable between a computer and
an MP three player. He also said it could take
up to ten minutes to transfer the full one thousand
songs to an iPod, but it would take five hours
if you wanted to do the same with USB, so
he was really touting the superiority of FireWire over USB
at the time. Jobs also said that the iPods battery
(16:45):
would supply ten hours of continuous play, and that it
would have fast charge capability to regain eighty percent of
its capacity in one hour of charging, and that the
FireWire cable would provide not just data transfer, but also
provide power, so you could plug your iPod into your
computer using the FireWire cable and you could charge your
(17:08):
iPod while you're also transferring music to it, and all
this for the low, low price of three dollars. If
we were to adjust for inflation today, that would be
about the same as six hundred fifty bucks yells them. Now,
by the time Apple unveiled the iPod, the company had
(17:29):
already launched iTunes. They launched iTunes at the beginning of
two thousand one, and the iPod was announced in October
of that year. Now, at that time, iTunes was strictly
a digital music management program. You could put a CD
into a Mac and you could rip music from that
c D and make digital files of it and use
(17:51):
iTunes to organize your music collection, but it would live
on your computer. iTunes would then become the software component
to manage iPods, at least on max, and connecting an
iPod to your computer with iTunes would allow for automatic synchronization.
So if you had added new music to your computer, well,
the next time you plug your iPod in, those new
(18:13):
tracks could transition seamlessly to your iPod, so you'd have
them ready for when you're on the go. The iPod
was a pretty big departure for Apple, and it was
a success. You know, Apple had experimented with some uh
consumer electronics outside of computers a bit in the past
(18:34):
and had had let's say, mixed success. The Newton is
a an infamous flop for Apple, right, but the iPod
was not a flop, and the following year, in two
thousand two, Apple updated the iPod. It would ultimately offer
two models of the iPod, one that had a ten
gigabyte hard drive, so twice of the size of the original,
(18:57):
and the second would have a twenty gigabyte hard drive.
They also replaced the old mechanical scroll wheel, so you
no longer had a wheel that you could physically turn
around on the face of this iPod, and they replaced
it with a capacitive sensing touch wheel, so kind of
like a touch screen in a sense, except it wasn't
a screen. It was just this round, rounded section of
(19:20):
the surface of the iPod, so you are no longer
physically turning a wheel to scroll through stuff. The new
iPods were also compatible with Windows PCs, which dramatically expanded
the potential customer base for Apple in the process. Now,
at the time, there was no iTunes for PC for
for Windows, so PC users had to rely on software
(19:42):
called Music Match Jukebox in order to organize their music
collections and send music over to their iPods. The new
iPod also had a thirty pin dock connector, and then
you could use a dock that had FireWire or a
dock that had USB. That was good because FireWire was
(20:03):
pretty much unheard of on Windows PCs. There were some
that had FireWire reports, but it was not a standard.
It was far more common to run into USB connections.
In two thousand three, Apple introduced iTunes for Windows and
thus migrated away from Music Match, Jukebox and UM. iTunes
(20:25):
for Windows was pants, meaning it was not good, at
least in my opinion, at least back in those days.
It felt bloated and unwieldy. It had massive processor demands.
It took up too much of your computer memory. At
least in my experience, I really didn't like using it.
(20:46):
I'm sure I would have felt differently if I had
owned a Mac computer instead of a Windows PC, but
on Windows it was a shore. Oh. In two thousand
three was also when Apple launched the iTunes music store,
that that you could actually purchase digital music directly from Apple,
rather than rip it from c D s uh. That
(21:07):
was the other way you could really get music. There
were some other independent and and studio owned digital music
stores out there, but none of them had really taken
off in popularity. And of course there was the black
market piracy trading culture out there. Napster was gone by
(21:29):
two thousand three. It had been sued out of existence.
But it's not like piracy just went away after that.
But this is when Apple introduced the legit iTunes music store.
It's also when Apple would introduce the fair Play Digital
Rights Management or DRM solution, which restricted iTunes purchases to
play only on authorized devices. So this was again back
(21:52):
when music labels had a lot of leverage over Apple.
All Right, we've got a lot more to get through
with the evil of the iPod and its eventual demise.
But before we get into any of that, let's take
another quick break. Okay, we're up to two thousand four.
(22:16):
That's when Apple would expand iPod line again. So earlier
years had seen iPods with you know, larger hard drive
sizes and that kind of thing, like modest improvements, but
two thousand four saw entirely new iPod models. Apple introduced
the iPod many in two thousand four, and as the
name suggests, it was significantly smaller than the standard iPod
(22:40):
and it had a hard drive that could hold up
to one thousand songs, similar to the original iPod. Apple
also introduced the iPod Photo, which was an iPod with
a color digital screen that could display photos on it. Obviously,
you would transfer the photos from your computer to your iPod,
you could scroll through them, and there was also a
fourth generation standard iPod as well. Two thousand four was
(23:04):
also when the term podcasting began to catch on. Now,
the practice had been around for a while, right There
had already been cases of serialized digital audio content that
people could subscribe to that dated back a few years
from before two thousand four, But two thousand four was
(23:25):
where podcasting as a word really emerged. I would argue
that that really drove home how Apple had nailed the
MP three player technology and the marketing for digital audio
players because it had become the de facto leader in
the space and had to find the technology. You know,
(23:47):
it didn't it didn't invent it, but they refined it
to a point where that was the standard, so much
so that an entire medium was named after the iPod podcasting.
Then in two thousand five, we got the iPod Nano,
which was an even smaller iPod than the iPod Mini.
(24:08):
It used flash storage rather than a hard drive, and
in the early days of digital audio players, flash storage
was a real limitter and it was really expensive. It
couldn't hold very much, and it cost a lot to produce.
That's why Apple chose to go with physical hard drives
for its early iPods. But by two thousand five, the
(24:29):
capacity was starting to go up and the price was
starting to come down, so the Nano was available in
two gigabyte and four gigabyte capacity models. It had a
color screen, and it was smaller than the iPod Mini was,
which in turn was smaller than the standard iPod. A
few months after it debuted, the Nano would replace the
(24:49):
Mini and Apple would just discontinue the Mini model entirely. Also,
two thousand five was when the iPod Shuffle came out.
The iPod Shuffle h is an odd little thing. Most
models don't have any display at all. Uh In fact,
it has a pretty simple interface. It's got a power button,
a play pause button, and controls that allow you to
(25:12):
change the volume and skip a song or go back
to a song. And the Shuffle could play songs you know,
in whatever order was organized on the device, or as
the name suggests it could shuffle them randomly, so the
shovel was even smaller than the nano. It maxed out
with a one gigabyte hard drive model when it launched,
(25:34):
or I guess I should say flash drive model one
gigabyte of storage when it launched. Also in two thousand five,
Apple introduced a fifth generation iPod that was capable of
playing video. So now we're at the point where you
could transfer video files to a an iPod, which otherwise
was modeled like the classic iPod, and you can watch
(25:55):
those videos whenever you wanted. Where still in that where
you had to physically connect your iPod with your your
computer in order to synchronize files between the devices and
to transfer new material to the iPods. So it's not
like you could just download videos natively to the device.
You still had to connect it physically to your computer
(26:16):
to do that. And finally, two thousand five, finally, for
two thousand five, anyway, it was a critical year for
my profession. See that's the year that Steve Jobs announced
that podcasts would be incorporated directly into iTunes, so iTunes
users would be able to subscribe to podcasts and whenever
(26:37):
they synchronize their iPods with their computers, any new episodes
of the shows they subscribed to would automatically transfer to
their iPod, and Apple took podcasting, which at that time
was still a very young medium, and they pushed it
further toward the mainstream. The success of the iPod in
no small way contributed to the early growth of podcasts,
(27:00):
though it would take more than a decade for podcasts
to become popular enough so that the average person knew
what the heck a podcast was. Occasionally I still run
into people who aren't sure what a podcast is, but
it's it's more rare these days now. The joke is
everybody has a podcast. Back then, most people didn't even
know what the heck podcast was. And it also became
(27:22):
true pretty quickly that if you wanted your podcast to
do well, you really had to hold out hope that
Apple was going to feature your podcast on its podcast page,
because that pretty much guaranteed you would see a rush
of new subscribers. Some of the shows on our network,
such as Stuff You Should Know, benefited tremendously due to
(27:43):
Apple featuring the podcast on the iTunes podcast section. Now,
I also have to point out that if it weren't
for the fact that Stuff You Should Know is just
a really great show with incredibly talented hosts. It wouldn't
matter for all the promotion in the world, right, It
wouldn't make a difference. If the show was terrible, people
wouldn't stay subscribed to it. So I don't want to
(28:06):
take any credit away from the creators. They are legitimately
great at what they do, but the iTunes promotion helped
them out considerably in the early days to get a
big following. Now, two thousand six was less eventful than
two thousand five. Apple released updated generations for the iPod
(28:27):
and the Nano and the Shuffle. Nothing really spectacular to
note here. The new models were obviously improvements over previous generations,
but that was pretty much it. But then in two
thousand seven we got two things that would be huge
for Apple now. The really big one was the iPhone.
By this time, Apple's image had really skyrocketed. The popularity
(28:50):
of the iPod had truly transformed the company, and the
iPhone would push Apple beyond the stratosphere and into lower
th orbit at least. But that same year Apple also
introduced the iPod Touch. The Touch was essentially an iPhone
without the phone part. There was no cellular antenna in
(29:12):
the iPod Touch, but it featured the same multi touch
screen as the iPhone. Most of the internal components were
the same. They would have a camera had it was
able to run apps, at least apps that didn't require
a cellular connection, so in many ways it was like
an iPhone, just without the phone part. And the iPod
Touch also had WiFi connectivity, so you could use an
(29:34):
iPod Touch to browse the web or message people, and
you could even purchase digital music wirelessly. You still couldn't
synchronize wirelessly. That would come a little bit later. Apple
still offered the original iPod form factor. I mean not
the original original, because we're not talking about a mechanical
scroll wheel or anything, but the the form factor that
(29:56):
we associate with the old school iPods, and from that
point for at Apple would refer to those types of
iPods as the iPod Classic. By the end of two
thousand seven, Apple had sold more than a hundred forty
million iPods. Like I said, the iPod line transformed Apple,
but the iPhone was going to be way more disruptive. Now.
(30:18):
Over the following years, Apple would continue to evolve the Nano,
the Shuffle, and the Touch iPod lines. It would continue
to support the classic line, but those really didn't change
too much year to year. In two thousand eight, Apple
added a feature that let you play a random song
on your nano's playlist if you just shook your nano.
(30:40):
I really wonder how many nano's perished as people over
enthusiastically tried to search for a cool random song. In
Apple changed the nano design. It used to be kind
of like a thin rectangle. It was much taller than
it was wide, but the model turned the Nano into
a square. It kind of looks like the watch face
(31:02):
of an Apple Watch. In fact, the fourth generation iPod
Touch would have a retina display, so that was a
very high definition display capable of sharp, vibrant graphics. It
could also shoot HD photos and videos, and it was
the first iPod Touch to have a front facing camera,
which meant you could actually use the iPod Touch to
(31:24):
make FaceTime calls over WiFi. The fourth generation Touch would
also get a further update that would allow for wireless
synchronization with iTunes, so now you no longer had to
dock your Touch to your computer to synchronize across the
two devices. The fifth generation Touch got a larger screen
(31:46):
and a lightning DOC connector, which allowed for even faster
data transfer speeds. And during this time, Apple continued to
support the iPod Classic models, but the company would ultimately
discontinue those in stept Tober two thousand fourteen. The iPod
Shuffle and the iPod Nano would get the same treatment
in two thousand seventeen. Now, the reason I'm skipping over
(32:10):
all that, like I'm going from essentially two thousand eight
to two thousand four to two thousand seventeen, is because
the evolution of the devices were the kind of gradual
like they weren't. They weren't monumental leaps, and it would
be ridiculous just to go from year to year and say,
(32:30):
and here's where these minor changes came into play. But
now five years later, in two Apple is saying goodbye
to the Touch. And you might wonder why why is
Apple sunsetting the iPod line entirely, Well, it really has
to do with that pesky iPhone you see, as as
the iPhones battery life and storage capacity and then ultimately
(32:53):
access to streaming music services increased the demand for a
standalone music playback device decreased. The Touch held out longer
than the others because it was essentially a cheaper iPhone
just without the cellular phone part. You could even do
WiFi style calls on a Touch. In fact, my buddy
I as Actor, used an iPod Touch as his mobile
(33:16):
phone for a short while. I remember him telling me
about that at c E S and it blew my mind. Now,
if you look at how much iPods have contributed to
Apple's revenue, you would see that they really hit their
peak in two thousand six, not peak sales. They didn't
hit their peak sales till two thousand and eight, But
(33:36):
in two thousand six they contributed the most by percentage
to Apple's overall revenue. In two thousand six, they were
about of all of Apple's revenue, it just came from
iPod sales. So so nearly half of all of Apple's
revenue came from selling iPods in two thousand six. See,
(33:59):
I told you that I pod really turned things around
for Apple. Now, actual iPod sales, like I said, they
peaked in two thousand eight, So they sold more iPods
in two thousand eight than they did in two thousand six,
they sold fifty four point eight million units. Back in
two thousand six, they had sold thirty nine point four million.
(34:19):
But in two thousand eight, even though they sold more iPods,
those sales accounted for just tw Apple's revenue. And remember
in two thousand six it was of Apple's revenue. That
tells you a lot right there. Right If a company
sells fifteen million more units two years later, but those
(34:40):
sales contribute a smaller amount to the company's total revenue,
something else is really taking off. That's something else was
the iPhone. So the iPod was still a mega success,
but the iPhone was leaving it in the dust. From
two thousand eight, it was a downward trend. Now, it's
not like iPod sales inanked immediately, but in two thousand
(35:02):
nine it dipped from fifty four point eight million units
to fifty four point one million units, and at that
point the sales were accounting for around nineteen percent of
the company's total revenue, because again, the iPhone was just
a monster. By two thousand fourteen, the sales numbers were
down to fourteen point four million units and accounted for
(35:26):
about one percent of the total revenue for Apple. Now,
after two thousand fourteen, Apple would just lump in iPod
sales with other categories, so it became impossible to see
how iPod sales and revenue were going. The iPhone had
really eclipsed everything else, so it's not really a surprise
that the iPod touch is going away, or that the
(35:49):
iPod line in general is riding off into the sunset.
Some folks like yours truly held out for a really
long time and carried both an MP three player, and yes,
I eventually abandoned my creative zen for an iPod Classic
and also carried a smartphone at the same time. I
(36:09):
was one of those people. I had two devices. That
was because I didn't want to run down my phone's
battery while playing music, nor did I want to fill
up my phone's storage within an enormous music collection. Because
streaming services really were a thing yet at least not
a common thing. But eventually streaming services increased capacity and
(36:32):
better battery life all made standalone MP three players kind
of obsolete because smartphones could do it all. They could
act as your music library and a streaming platform and
a phone and a computer. There was no reason to
have to carry two of them. Apple is going to
sell off all remaining iPod touches that are in stock
(36:55):
and then puff they'll be gone. So if you want one,
now's the time to buy one before they all end
up on the aftermarket at ridiculously pumped up prices that
they are just not worth that they range in price
from about hundred ninety nine dollars for a thirty two
gigabyte model up to three dollars for a two hundred
(37:17):
fifty six gigabyte model. There are a few different colors available,
though not every color of iPod Touch has all the
different storage capacities available. Some of them are already out
of stock, and like I said, once the rest are gone,
that's it. So farewell iPod. You set Apple on a
(37:39):
trajectory to become one of the most powerful companies in
the world, and you lent your name to an art
form that has become my career. Plus, even though I
am an Android smartphone user and I used to own
a creative Zen MP three player, I do have to
admit that the iPod form factor and its performance were
top notch. Just wish that darn iTunes software had worked
(38:02):
better on Windows. That's it for this episode of Tech Stuff.
If you have suggestions for topics I should tackle in
future episodes, please reach out to me. The best way
to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the
show is text Stuff H s W and I'll talk
to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I
(38:28):
Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.