The History of the iPod, 2001–2022

The first iPod

The iPod story began on 23 October 2001, when Apple announced its first music player; it went on sale on 10 November 2001. The original model stored up to 1,000 songs on a 5 GB hard drive, weighed 6.5 ounces, ran for up to 10 hours on a charge and had a suggested price of US$399. It worked only with Macs, synchronising with iTunes over FireWire. Early criticism centred on the price and the Mac-only design. Windows versions followed in 2002, and iTunes for Windows was released on 16 October 2003.

Product lines and the iTunes Store

The full-size iPod went through six generations. It gained a touch-sensitive wheel in 2002, the Dock Connector in 2003 and the Click Wheel in 2004; a colour screen arrived with the iPod photo in October 2004 and video playback in October 2005. The sixth generation, introduced on 5 September 2007, took the name iPod classic. Smaller lines followed: the iPod mini (announced 6 January 2004), the screenless iPod shuffle (11 January 2005), the iPod nano (7 September 2005), which replaced the mini, and the iPod touch (5 September 2007), the first iPod with Wi-Fi and a multi-touch screen.

The iTunes Music Store opened on 28 April 2003 with more than 200,000 tracks at 99 cents each, at first only for Mac users in the United States. It passed one billion song downloads on 23 February 2006 and was renamed the iTunes Store in September 2006, when it began selling feature films.

Peak, decline and the end of the line

Apple announced its 100 millionth iPod sale on 9 April 2007. The highest quarterly figure came in the 2008 holiday quarter, when Apple sold a record 22,727,000 iPods, and cumulative sales passed 220 million by September 2009. Sales declined in the years that followed, and from its 2015 fiscal year Apple stopped reporting iPod sales separately, folding them into "other products". The iPod classic was discontinued on 9 September 2014, and the iPod nano and iPod shuffle were withdrawn on 27 July 2017. On 10 May 2022 Apple announced that the iPod touch, the last model in the range, would be sold only while supplies lasted. Total sales are estimated at about 450 million units.

What this site covers

Model pages describe each generation of the full-size iPod (later iPod classic), iPod mini, iPod nano, iPod shuffle and iPod touch, with launch dates, capacities, prices and design changes. Year pages, from 2001 to 2012, set out what Apple released and announced in each year. The advertising section indexes the songs used in iPod television commercials, from the 2001 launch spot to the silhouette campaign and its artist tie-ins, and reference pages cover accessories and buying an iPod.