Birth

When Apple launched the iPod in 2001, portable CD players and cassette-tape based Sony Walkman ruled the portable music landscape. Apple was still in recovery from its disastrous turn in the 1990s without Jobs, and the few gadgets Apple had put out, such as the , were commercial failures.

The iPod Classic was something new, quaint by today's standards. The screen is a low resolution black-and-white LCD and the hardware is little more than a 5GB 1.8-inch hard drive with some buttons strapped to it. The scroll wheel, or "click wheel" as it was called because of the click, click, click sound it made, actually turned.

A series of quick updates expanded the hard drive, replaced the mechanical scroll wheel with the touch-sensitive style users are familiar with today, and brought Windows compatibility to the iPod. But the next big thing in iPods would come in 2003, when Jobs introduced a new way to buy music for the device.

Introducing iTunes