Apple introduced the iPod on October 23, 2001. It was a small white device that held a thousand songs, and Steve Jobs called it a thousand songs in a pocket. The company was about to change.
The timing was strange. Apple had launched the device weeks after the September 11 attacks, when the economy was shaken and the mood was grim, and the iPod was expensive and worked only with Macs. It did not look like the start of anything.
The device was better than its rivals. Other players existed, but they were clumsy and held little, and the iPod had a scroll wheel and a hard drive that made a whole music collection portable. People who touched it wanted it. It sold.
The breakthrough came with the iTunes Store. Two years later Apple made it possible to buy single songs for a dollar, and the iPod became the player for legal digital music, and the record industry, which had fought downloading, was reshaped around it. The era of the album gave way to the era of the playlist.
The iPod made Apple. It turned a struggling computer maker into a consumer electronics power, and the lessons and the money from it funded the iPhone, which changed everything again. A white rectangle with a wheel carried the company into the future.