More than twenty years after the release of the then revolutionary iPod, Apple discontinued production of the portable media player. The iconic player has since been replaced by other devices, making the iPod a redundant, according to the tech company. In a message on her website titled “music live”Apple announced that iPod stock will no longer be replenished.

In 2001, Apple – then best known for its colorful computers – announced its first MP3 player. An elegant white rectangle with a black and white screen, a large circular “click wheel” and remarkably large storage capacity for the time. Then-CEO Steve Jobs promised “a thousand songs in your pocket.” “Listening to music will never be the same again.”

Turns out, Jobs is not wrong. The various generations of the iPod, which later also acquired a touch screen and increasingly resembled the iPhone, sold nearly 400 million times and replaced other MP3 players. from the street scene. An extensive music playlist on the go is, of course, a thing.

Apple is grounded

“Music has always been at the heart of Apple, and bringing music to hundreds of millions of users, as has the iPod, has affected more than just the music industry,” wrote Marketing Director Greg Joswiak. “It has also redefined how music is discovered, listened to, and shared,” he said, also referring to the digital music store that iTunes is linked to.

iTunes disappeared in 2019. Here are the highlights of my nearly 20 years of using iTunes: