I remember the birth of the iPod, 25 years ago this month. I was working at Newsweek. It was October 23, little more than a month after the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and everybody was focused on the aftermath. I didn’t go to Cupertino for the launch, where Steve Jobs pulled the gadget from his jeans pocket and boasted that it contained a whole music library. Apple couriers hand-delivered the device to me in New York, and Jobs got on the phone with me. “iPod,” he told me, “will be a landmark product.”

He was right. By 2004, I was writing a cover story called “iPod Nation,” and later I published a book about the iPod called The Perfect Thing.

The death of the iPod wasn’t as memorable. It’s not even clear when it happened. Officially, one might date the time of death as occurring on May 10, 2022, when Apple discontinued the iPod Touch, the last product to use that name. But I never considered the Touch a real iPod; it was simply an iPhone without cellular connectivity. Maybe the appropriate death call might have been July 27, 2017, when Apple killed the Nano—the last traditional iPod with a screen—and the iPod Shuffle, a postage-stamp-sized player that clipped to your shirt. (Apple had quietly discontinued the classic iPod, with a hard drive and click wheel, in 2014.)

All these final dates were an inevitable consequence of what Steve Jobs put in motion on January 11, 2007.

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