Many agree the Apple iPod was one of the products helping Apple to get the company healthy again.

Some people agree the Apple iPod was one of the products helping Apple get back on track again, it was at least a good helping hand. It was released on October 23, 2001. The image below shows the first player released and they have come a long way since then... Many of us have already been shopping apple iPod and it seems like the market is somewhat saturated already.

If you buy one iPod today you get a lot of features. You can not only listen to music but watch videos, carry around your photos, play games, surf the web (with iPod Touch) and much more. It is amazing how much the development have come along thinking about what the original first released iPod could do. Also when speaking of how much storage you can put inside these small units. With the iPod Classic you can carry around 120GB! of music and data. 120GB data is about 30 000 songs, or 150 hours of video. And you carry it around in your pocket.

Image of the first iPod released. If Apple had not released iTunes I am not sure if this device would be as popular as it got. With iTunes you can sync the iPod to your computer easily. Import your original music CDs into iTunes and then transfer them to the iPod. iTunes has also developed a lot along with the iPod, supporting new features and improvements.

No More DRM!

The latest improvement that amazed me was the decision to completely remove all DRM from the iTunes store! DRM is Digital Rights Management where they can control how the data is being used. I can not quite understand how the record companies accepted this. What this means in easy terms is that the music you buy and download from the iTunes store can now be played in other MP3 players. Not just the iPod as before. I truly believe this marks a new era of digital music distribution and Apple are on the front line. With this move the bit-rate of all the music files have increased too, making the sound quality much better.

As you know, iTunes is used for transferring music to the device and it is available for both Windows and Macintosh systems. For those people that do not want to use iTunes there are open source alternatives available. One example is YamiPod which works with Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. Best of all it is free to download and use. iTunes is also used to transfer videos, photos, contact information, games and the content supported by the model you have.

In September 2008 the iPods had sold more than 173 million units, making it the most sold music player in history.

The current iPods:
iPod shuffle
iPod nano
iPod Classic
iPod touch

History Lesson

If you want to learn a little history check the video below where Steve Jobs for the first time reveal the Apple iPod. At the time no one knew how big the phenomenon was going to get. This video is history.