JoshuaG
1 HN recommender · recommended in 7 months, 2010–2022
9:13 · 6M views · Apr 3, 2006
Steve Jobs introduces the first iPod at a small Apple event in 2001. He positions it as a music player and ties it to the Apple brand.
HN commenters use it to compare against later Apple launches, to show how low-key the debut was, and as an example of a great product speech.
7 comments from Hacker News
o u said steve jobs: really his announcement of the ipod was an incredible speech .. it ties together tech+art+music+apple and his vision appears pretty fresh. this video
> There's a circus about them that permits them to stomp out history And how do you think they would do that? Apple sometimes uses a bit of hyperbole to describe itself ( [LINK] ), but I don’t think Apple ever claimed "Apple invented the mouse" or they had "the first mp3 player" or "the first smartphone". I also have never met anybody who made such claims, only people saying there are people who make such claims. It also would be weird for them to do so. Their marketing differentiates their products from the competition, and has been doing that for years. The competition sells MP3 players, the iPod was a _music_player_ or just the iPod (look at this video , and count how often Steve says music before he says mp3. [1]); the iPhone an iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communications device ( [LINK] ), the iPad just the iPad. [1] There’s a claim in hat video that Apple invented FireWire. I think that is mostly correct. They were the driving force there.
The iPod wasn't another MP3 player. It was the MP3 player, featuring the most songs in the least amount of space. For mobile devices, this makes a big difference. Compare the iPad launch video from today with the original iPod launch: this video The iPhone was the first phone capable enough and attractive enough for third-party applications. It came two years ahead of competition. The iPad comes after the Kindle, and alongside plans from Microsoft and others to launch their own tablets.
Seems strange to leave out the iPhone product announcement, especially since the iPod announcement was pretty low key ( this video ), and was not an obvious hit at the event. Compare that to the iPhone announcement where everyone went wild right then and there, and truly felt like the culmination of Steve's vision of what computing should become (the iPod in retrospect seemed more like a side project that didn't really "mesh" with his general philosophy on computing).
This has been the case since 2007 with "iPhone"...which mimicked the naming for "iPod" since 2001 [0]...which mimicked the naming of "iMac" since 1998 [1]. All of these, of course, go back to Steve Jobs' introduction of "Macintosh" in 1984 [2]. [0] this video [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]