10 years of the iPod: a design retrospective

When the original iPod first came out 10 years ago, the concept didn’t seem novel to those who had already hopped on the MP3 player bandwagon. What was new—aside from its deep integration with Apple’s music store—was the physical design. The minimalist layout, the screen with playlists, the easy-access buttons—and oh, the scroll wheel! These were all elements that made up a signature Apple design. 

The iPod in all of its manifestations has now been part of our lives for a decade now, and it has become clear that the world fancies its design. Whether in its original form or in a shrunken down and slightly manipulated format, the influence of the original iPod has remained part of American pop culture for a decade. Everywhere you look, there are iPods—iPod shuffles attached to people at the gym, iPod touches and every generation of nano being fiddled with on the subway, iPod classics, and iPhones being toted on airplanes.

How did the iPod’s original design morph over time? Let’s look back.

The one that started it all

The original iPod was a sight to behold. Not only was it a behemoth of an MP3 player—hey, it had an entire physical hard drive in there, after all—it was all-white, had a unique navigation and volume control (the circular click wheel), and most importantly, playlists were displayed via the built-in LCD.

When the iPod was first introduced, the world didn’t even know how to react. Geeks were yelling “LESS SPACE THAN A NOMAD!” while others were thinking “but I already have an MP3 player.” Indeed, Apple was by no means the first to drop into the MP3 player market, but the iPod’s design and functionality apparently appealed to wide swaths of people, making it the most successful MP3 player on the market. When the iTunes Music Store was introduced in 2003, there were even more benefits to using an iPod—the iTunes Store itself was one of the first of such stores on the Internet, and the iPod was the only device (besides the computer) that could play the then-DRMed 99-cent files. People were hooked instantly.

Over time, the original iPod’s form morphed a bit. The third-generation iPod showed some of the most significant changes, with rearranged controls and touch-based buttons that lit up when they detected finger presses. The fourth-generation iPod was the first to come with a color screen and support to show off photographs transferred from the computer, and the fifth-generation iPod was the first to support video.

Apple was clearly laying the foundation for the launch of the iPod touch in mid-2007, which is the same time the company introduced what’s now called the “iPod classic,” the last remaining iPod that looks and acts most like the original introduced in 2001. It still has a spinning hard drive inside! Nowadays though, most iPod-toting users have moved on to newer, thinner, lighter, and feature-rich iPods—none of which could have existed without that original idea from 2001.

Then came the iPod mini

Why use a full-sized iPod when you could use a miniature version of it? Apple introduced the iPod mini in 2004, almost three years after the original iPod made its debut. The iPod mini’s aesthetic design mimicked that of the original iPod in almost every way; the device was rectangular and contained a small hard drive, and sported a round navigation wheel with an LCD screen above it to display playlists and other info.

The devil was in the details. By then, Apple had ditched the physically spinning click wheel in the regular-sized iPod in favor of a touch-based wheel that didn’t move, and this design element was passed down to the iPod mini as well. The iPod mini was also the first iPod that Apple offered in multiple colors, which helped its popularity.

Incidentally, the iPod mini was only around for less than two years—Apple eventually discontinued it in favor of its newer, thinner, Flash-based cousin, the iPod nano. But even during its short time on the market, the iPod mini generated an almost cult-like following, and plenty of people were sad to see it go—even if they did eventually become iPod nano converts.

Entering the iPod nano era

Aside from the original iPod/iPod classic design, the iPod nano has been one of the most successful and enduring iPods to date. Apple introduced the iPod nano in late 2005—my first ever iPod review for Ars, in fact!—with a black or white plastic front and shiny metal back, not unlike the materials used on the original iPod in 2001. Like the iPod mini before it, the iPod nano mimicked the design of the regular-sized iPod with a round, but unmovable, touch-based click wheel and small screen to display playlists and other features.

But this time, there was no hard drive—the entire thing was based on flash storage, making the device the thinnest iPod ever. The iPod nano was so thin in fact, that at its introduction, many users were concerned about it snapping in half, which is what led to our original attempt to “stress test” the device.

The iPod nano eventually adopted colors like the iPod mini, once again making it wildly popular among adults and children like. There was even one year when the iPod nano got fat, but then thinned down again and gained a much bigger screen the following year. When Apple introduced the sixth-generation iPod nano in 2010, though, the company ended up ditching manual controls altogether and made the device all (touch)screen, all the time, much like a shrunken-down version of the iPod touch. Now, the nano lives on happily as a touchscreen-only device and has managed to find its niche among the runner/gym rat crowd.

iPod shuffles, too

The iPod shuffle was introduced in early 2005, prior to the death of the iPod mini and the introduction of the iPod nano. The goal at the time was to offer an even cheaper and minimalist music player to those who just wanted the bare minimum functionality and didn’t care about seeing what song was playing. There was no playlist functionality built into the first iPod shuffles—users were supposed to load their MP3s and other iTunes-purchased music onto the shuffle randomly, and then use nothing but the shuffle functionality (hence the name) while listening on the go. Despite the severely reduced specs, the iPod shuffle did catch on among a small group of users—namely public transit commuters and runners.

The iPod shuffle has gone through a number of design changes over the years too. It originated as a white plastic stick-of-gum design with a circular button controller (hey, gotta look like an iPod somehow, right?), but eventually became even tinier with a clip attached so that users would be able to attach it to a shirt, pants, or bag for easy access. Apple even briefly experimented with a completely buttonless shuffle design in the third iteration introduced in 2009, but eventually brought back the shuffle’s hardware buttons the following year after users complained about confusing controls and indecipherable blinking light patterns at the top of the device.

Today, the iPod shuffle still occupies a space in Apple’s iPod lineup—in a rainbow of colors, of course. Although the iPod nano is now nearly identical to the shuffle—plus a screen and more functionality—there are still people who are loyal to the shuffle for their own reasons, not the least of which being that it remains the cheapest iPod available at $49.