Launched almost a decade ago, the iPod is,by far, one of the most successful selling products worldwide. Ever since its first appearance, in October 23 2001, the Apple product promised to be something different from the other media players already existent.
At first, the company started creating software for the continues growing market of multimedia gadgets starting with digital cameras or organizers, which, already were of a much more importance in the real world than a device that can only store and play music files. Only after discovering the niche market of music players, engineers from Apple Inc decided to develop their own technology and set of products.
With less then a year of researches and studies, the Apple company put on the market in 2001 their first product from the music player’s category : the iPod. The first generation of iPods was the original one, with mechanical scroll wheel and a capacity of 5-10 GB. Still, by far, the most affordable iPods category was the iPod shuffle generation which, although not so performant, it was still capable of playing up to 12 hours of music without charging. The first iPod shuffle was released in January 2005 and had a capacity of only 512MB -1GB. It used the flash memory and had no screen but its main advantages were the smaller clip design and the attractive colors.
Newer generations of iPods include now hi-tech in small packages and the world known models are: the iPod nano, the iPod touch, the iPod mini and the Classics (including the first generation of iPods capable of picture viewing in color screen).
Sales worldwide
Since October 2004, iPods have dominated the line of digital music players sales in the United States, with over 90% of the market for hard drive-based players and over 70% of the market for all types of players, which conveys into a massive profit rage. 2007 was clearly the Apple year, when it was first announced in January that the company recorded revenue of 7.1 billion USD, of which 47% represented iPods sales. Months after, on 5 September 2007 during an important event, the iPod line was announced of surpassing 110 million units sold. Also, 42% of the company’s profit sales in 2008 came from iPods. Later on, in September 2009, the Apple officialties announced that worldwide, iPods have reached 200 million copies sold.
As being constantly developing its features, ever since its launching in 2001, the iPod line was a total success and it’s no wonder to anybody that sales have increased year by year. Also, the new models and features of high technology make the last generation of iPods constantly improving, giving birth to a world phenomena, and what was first considered as a risky business is now considered one of the most profitable industries in the world, thanks to the iPod line. As of January 2010, iPods gone up to over 240,000,000 units sold worldwide.