While the iPod was always a relatively successful product, it took a while to really take off. According to Apple's own sales figures the iPod took a year and a half to sell its millionth iPod in May of 2003. By the end of 2004 the company had sold over 5 million iPods.

A large part of that jump in popularity can be attributed to the launch of the in 2003. When the service was launched, music piracy was rampant thanks to services like the original peer-to-peer file sharing software called Napster, and the music labels were actively hostile to the idea of putting music online. While the initial service drew criticism for some of the compromises it made (its reliance on DRM to satisfy record labels was a particularly large target) it quickly became the most popular online music service and sold its . Even more impressively it hit these numbers before iTunes was even available on Windows. By last year the iTunes store had served up more than .

While the iTunes store brought Apple a healthy chunk of change, the iTunes Store was really a strategy to sell iPods. This strategy seems to have been moderately successful. To date, according Apple's own quarterly sales figures, the company has sold more than 300 million iPods.

Expanding the Family

Those numbers include more than just the iPod Classic. Over the years, the iPod stopped being a single device and started to be the core of a family of Apple music players and other digital devices. At first the iPod was the solid center of the iPod product line with the smaller Mini, Nano, and Shuffle lines seeming more like cheaper bare-bones alternatives to the original iPod.