"With iPod, Apple has invented a whole new category of digital music player that lets you put your entire music collection in your pocket and listen to it wherever you go," said Steve Jobs as the first iPod launched in 2001. "With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again." Thanks to the iPod's far-reaching impact over the last decade, you could argue that the consumer electronics industry has never been the same again.
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On the tenth anniversary of the iPod's debut we take a look at just how influential Apple's portable digital music player has been. Take a look at our analysis, complete with comment from experts. Have your say in the comments below.
1. Transforming the Consumer Electronics Industry
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"The iPod truly ushered in the era of portable digital consumer electronics, much as the Walkman did for analog audio," states Jordan Selburn, principal analyst of consumer electronics at IHS-iSuppli.
In just 10 years the iPod has been so influential that the word has come to represent a portable digital music player in the same way "Hoover" dominates the vacuum cleaner market. Apple wasn't the first to introduce such a device, so why has the iPod brand dominated all others?
"The iPod wasn't the first MP3 player out there -- before it came out I'd used models from Rio for my runs -- but it took the shortcomings inherent in the existing products in the market and improved on them," explains Jonathan Seff, executive editor, MacWorld.
"It held much more music than a typical MP3 player, and its use of FireWire meant transfer speeds much faster than the slow 12Mbps USB everyone else was using," Seff continues. "Plus the combo of hardware and software (iTunes) made it easier to use than much of what else was out there. And in very little time, the iPod took over the digital music player section of the market."
Apple has had something like 70% market share for years now. There are still competing products (minus the Microsoft Zune, which was recently killed off), but the others are fighting over a pretty small sliver of the pie."
Leander Kahney, editor of Cult of Mac and author of The Cult of iPod, sees the iPod's primary impact in terms of the "connected device."
"Gadgets are no longer stand-alone products," Kahney says, "they connect to a range of software and online services. Think Internet TVs, stereos like Sonos, handheld gaming devices, GPS bike computers, in-car stereos, high-end watches, Internet radios, even printers -- the list goes on and on -- and the iPod was the first to do that.
"In terms of connected devices, Selburn sees the iPod as essential tool for hooking consumers to content. He says the device "ignited the idea of ubiquitous access to content," an influence that can now be seen across all areas of consumer electronics.
"The era of the connected consumer, ignited by the iPod, is now coming to fruition. In the very near future, consumers will truly have access to all of their content anywhere they are, and on a wide range of devices spanning from home theaters and large screens to media tablets and smartphones and, of course, their iPods."
2. An Influential Design
The iPod's design is iconic. Design museums around the world display iPods proudly. Apple's senior vice president of industrial design, Jonathan Ive, has earned multiple awards and accolades.
"One of the major reasons for the iPod's success is its unique design, which is simple and aesthetically appealing, making use of high-quality materials like stainless steel," says Dr. Peter Zec, CEO and intellectual and creative head of red dot. "The Apple Industrial Design Team, led by Jonathan Ive, focuses on strict and sustainable design politics: The first iPod fitted perfectly into Apple's product family of that time -- just like the latest models do, which pick up today's unibody design of the iMac or MacBook Pro.
"The simplicity of the iPod's design speaks for itself: There are no unnecessary buttons or wheels, just one single element to navigate intuitively through the product's entire music library.
"When the first iPod was put into the market in 2001, it was a breakthrough and changed portable music from scratch, continues Zec. "There are only few products that shaped the lifestyle of a generation, found its way into popular culture and became the archetype of an entire product group like this.
It's not just the iPod's hardware that has been influential. Apple's user interface and experience also had an enormous impact on the market.
"The iPod had an enormous effect on the UI/UX of consumer electronics, completely changing the game from the day it was launched," says Joshua Porter, interface designer and director of UX at HubSpot.
Porter says the iPod's simple interface was optimized for music playing. The "fun" scrollwheel let users easily move through large lists of music, and the device's pocket-sized ergonomics had rounded corners and was generally comfortable to use.
"I would say that, in general, the addictive nature of all of these pieces created an amazing user experience that just wasn't possible with anything else on the market," concludes Porter. "Apple was the first company to truly think of the overarching activity of purchasing, organizing, and listening to music -- and designing their ecosystem to make that activity pleasurable -- a good experience from beginning to end."
Even the iPod's headphones were strategically designed. "The white headphones were interesting at first, but it was quickly realized that they were an amazing advertisement for iPods," says Porter. "I even heard stories of people switching to black headphones because thieves were targeting the white ones!"
3. The Changing Music Industry
Over the last 10 years, the iPod's companion software, iTunes, has evolved from a simple music management application to a multi-billion dollar online store, with agreements with all the major record labels.
"Without easy-to-use software such as iTunes, the iPod would be as useless as most of the other players on the market," says Patrik Wikstr?m, author of The Music Industry - Music in the Cloud.
"In the early days of the iPod and iTunes, Apple was considered by the industry to be part of 'the digital problem' and to encourage piracy," continues Wikstr?m. The industry argued (probably correctly) that most music on peoples' iPods was illegal. The iPod and iTunes was a cog in the global piracy machinery and probably contributed to the shrinking CD sales rather than anything else. It was not until 2003 when iTunes Music Store was launched when the industry started to believe that Apple was going to save them all. It was indeed an important step when Apple was able to convince all the major labels to license their music to iTunes."
Wikstr?m says one could argue that iTunes has been more a hindrance to the industry than a help. Despite the billions of sales using the platform, the music industry has still suffered over the past decade. Did the dominant iTunes business model blind the industry to alternatives?
"iTunes prolonged the industry's dependence on the old model, and made them believe that it actually might be possible just to shift from CD to MP3, just as they had done in the past when they moved from vinyl to tape to CD," says Wikstr?m. "This is just speculation, but perhaps the most important impact on the music industry is that iTunes delayed the shift from a retail model based on control to what we now start to see emerge as various kinds of cloud-based retail models, such as Spotify and its peers."
Futurist Gerd Leonhard, author of The Future of Content and co-author of The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution also sees iTunes playing a part in the decline of the music industry.
"The genius of the iPod was (and still is, with the iPhone) that, while the music industry actually believed that it had found a good (i.e., closed and controlled) way to extract money from otherwise freeloading consumers, the iTunes/iPod/iPhone ecosystem became the dominant hardware solution for the consumption of free music."
4. The Accessories Market
Hundred of companies have created viable businesses on the back of the iPod. The iPeripherals marketplace is vast -- and arguably unique -- in its sheer scale and variety of products.
Evan Stein, the director of marketing for SDI Technologies' iHome brand (the manufacturer of the first iPod clock radio) says the iPod changed consumers' expectations.
"The iPod is a worldwide cultural phenomenon whose cross-media functionality (e.g. music, photos, video, etc.) has redefined what people could ever expect from an electronic device, and has created a new multi-million dollar industry of supporting accessories."
From speakers and headphones to in-car kits, covers, cases and skins, to novelty iProducts, the relationship between the iPod (and later iPhone) and the accessory market is self-propagating. The more iPods Apple sells, the larger the market for accessories. The larger the amount of accessories, the more likely people are to buy into the iPod ecosystem.
Griffin Technology has been described as one of the first companies to realize the commercial potential of the iPod, introducing its first iPod accessory just a year after the MP3 player launched.
"The abundance of devices that work with the iPod has opened the door for accessory manufacturers worldwide, and without it, the mobile accessory industry wouldn't be what it is today," says president of Griffin, Mark Rowan.
5. Changing Consumer Perceptions of Apple
The iPod has had an enormous impact on the average consumer's opinion of Apple. "Pre-iPod, Apple was primarily a computer company," says Jordan Selburn.
"The Macintosh, despite increasing popularity with the introduction of the iMac, was still a niche product," continues Selburn. "The success of the Macintosh computers can be attributed to the company's focus on the consumer rather than on raw technology (a critical success factor that seems to still elude many companies). The iPod brought that philosophy to the consumer electronics market and, as a result,...consumers now see Apple as a company where technology just works, and you don't need a Ph.D. to listen to a song."
Leander Kahney believes it was the iPod that solidified Apple's mainstream appeal. "Before the iPod, Apple had a reputation for making nice but expensive computers...But as the iPod became cheaper and more popular, so more and more consumers were introduced to the Apple brand. Someone who got an iPod for Christmas would wander into the Apple Store and start checking out the other products. Next thing you know, they've replaced their old PC with a MacBook. Then they buy an iPhone, then an iPad. So the iPod has a tremendous 'halo effect' -- the halo from the iPod shines a light on Apple's other products. It took a while, but Apple these days is thoroughly mainstream."
Jonathan Seff, who also notes the "halo effect," suggests the real breakthrough came when Apple first launched an iPod that worked with a Windows PC, and then when it introduced iTunes for Windows.
"When the iPod starting supporting Windows PCs, it opened Apple up to a whole new world of people who would never have considered buying anything from Apple. It took Apple from being a computer company for Mac users to a consumer electronics company for the masses. That led to the iPhone and the iPad, both of which are huge cross-platform products."
In Conclusion
Ten years later it's hard to believe we're talking about the massive impact of a pocket-sized, $399 gadget, especially considering consumer reaction to the device was initially lukewarm.
"Many people looked at the iPod when it came out and couldn't believe the price and the comparative lack of features," says Joshua Porter. "But once it became a hit, other companies had to redefine what great was in their own houses, but by then Apple was ahead of the game -- and still is."
Images courtesy of 37Prime, osaMu, EverJean, Robert S. Donovan, Peter Gerdes
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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