Watch Steve Jobs Unveil the iPod 13 Years Ago
Gather 'round, kids. Gather 'round. Old Uncle Doug is going to regale you with a tale of an excellent rectangle that was introduced to the world on October 23, 2001. Back in 2001, MP3 players weren't scarce, by any means, but they each had a fundamental problem They were either pocketable and could only hold a few dozen songs or they were comically big and could hold several hundred songs. I didn't own the original iPod. It was too expensive I didn't have 400 to my name and initially Mac-only I didn't have a Mac  a side-effect of not having money. I was, however, enamored with portable MP3 players. In fact, instead of buying several CD-, flash- and hard drive-based MP3 players at upwards of 200 a pop, as I did, I probably could have owned an iPod and maybe even a Mac. Here's a photo of two real gems I still own the Pocket mStation left and the NeoPlayer right, with an old iPhone 4 thrown into the mix to give you a sense of size. I'll frame these someday, These two ridiculous beasts each used a 2.5-inch hard drive commonly used in laptops. So I could stuff a ton of songs on them, but I couldn't stuff either of them into anything but the Hammer-est of Hammer pants. The world needed an MP3 player that was small enough to fit in a pocket, yet had enough storage to hold hundreds of songs. The problem was that flash-based storage maxed out at mere megabytes and tiny, high-capacity hard drives didn't exist in sufficient quantitiesyet. This was a conundrum for Apple engineers in late 2000, as Steve Jobs had expressed interest in building a sleek, pocketable MP3 player that could hold a ton of music. In true Steve Jobs fashion, Jobs tasked Jon Rubinstein with building such a device even though the necessary components didn't exist. Rubinstein lucked out, though. In February of 2001, while he was meeting with Toshiba, a boatload of tiny, high-capacity hard drives nearly fell in his lap. The following is a passage in Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs book page 384, The "exclusive rights to every one of the disks it could make" quip is important. Apple rolled out the iPod in late 2001 it would take a while for competing MP3 players to shrink down and catch up. Further Reading