Headline, May 31 2022/ HONOURS : ''' '' iPOD MEMORIES iPAN '' '''

HONOURS : ''' '' iPOD

 MEMORIES iPAN '' '''

RETIRING THE DEVICE THAT CHANGED IT ALL. Apple's IPod transferred the music industry and led to the iPhone's creation.

The first-generation i-Pod's $399 price tag blunted demand, limiting the company to sales of fewer than 400,000 units in the first year. Three years later, Apple released the iPod Mini, a 3.6 ounce aluminum case that came 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.

The iPod began with a modest goal : Let's create a music product that makes people want to buy more Macintosh computers. Within a few years, it would change consumer electronics and the music industry and lead to Apple becoming the most valuable company in the world.

FIRST arriving in October 2001, the pocket-size rectangle with a white face and a polished steel frame weighed 6.5 ounces. It came packaged with white earbuds in a custom color, moon gray, and held 1,000 songs.

It exploded in popularity in the years that followed, creating what became known as the iPod generation. Throughout much of the 2000s, people wondered the world, headphones dangling from their ears. The iPod was ubiquitous.

On May 18, Apple said goodbye to all that. The company announced that it had phased out productions of its iPod Touch, bringing an end to a two-decade run of a product line that inspired the creation of the iPhone and helped turn Silicon Valley into the epicenter of global capitalism.

Since introducing the iPod in 2001, Apple has sold an estimated 450 million of them, according to Loup Ventures, a venture capital firm specializing in tech research. Last year it sold an estimated three million iPods, a fraction of the estimated 250 million iPhones it sold.

APPLE assured customers that the music would live on, largely through the iPhone, which it introduced in 2007, and Apple Music, a seven-year-old service that testifies to customers' modern preferences.

The days of buying and owning songs on an iPod largely gave way to monthly subscriptions offerings that provide access to broader catalogs of music.

The iPod provided a blueprint for Apple for decades by packaging unrivaled industrial design, hardware engineering, software development and services. It also demonstrated how the company was seldom first to market with a new product but often triumphed.

In the late 1990s, the first digital music players were beginning to appear. The earliest versions could hold a couple dozen songs, allowing people who were in the early days of copying CDs onto their computers to transfer those songs onto their pockets.

Steve Jobs, who returned to Apple in 1997 after being pushed out more than a decade/earlier, viewed the emerging category as an opportunity to give Apple's legacy computer business modern appeal.

A die-hard music fan, Mr. Jobs thought tapping into people's love of music would help persuade them to switch to Macintoshes from Microsoft-powered personal computers, which had a more than 90 percent market share.

''You don't have to do any market research,'' said Jon Rubinstein, who led Apple's engineering at the time. ''Everyone loved music.''

Mr. Rubinstein helped spark the product's development by discovering a new hard disk drive made by Toshiba during a trip to Japan. The 1.8 inch drive had the capacity to store 1,000 songs. In essence, it made a possible Sony Walkman-size digital player with a capacity far greater than anything that existed in the market.

The iPod 's development coincided with Apple's acquisition of a company with MP3 software that would become the basis for iTunes, a digital Jukebox that organized people's music libraries so that they could quickly create Mr. Job's vision of how people would purchase music in the digital age.

''We think people want to buy their music on the internet by buying downloads, just like they bought LPs, just like they bought cassettes, just like they bought CDs,'' he said in a 2003 talk.

At the time a service called Napster was tormenting the music industry, making it possible for people to store any song with anyone for free. Mr. Jobs leaned into the music industry's woes by marketing the ability of new Macs to copy CDs with the commercial slogan : '' Rip. Mix. Burn.''

The campaign put the music industry in Apple's corner, according to Albhy Galuten, an executive at Universal Music Group at the time.

Mr. Galuten said the labels eventually agreed to let Apple sell songs on iTunes for 99 cents. ''We folded because we had no leverage,'' Mr. Gaulten said.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Mighty Products of the past, and Tech Torch, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Tripp Mickle.

With respectful dedication to the memory of Steve Jobs, Music Lovers of the world, and then Students, Professors and Teachers. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

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