On this day in 2001, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPod. He began the presentation by teasing “a breakthrough digital device that’s not a Mac.” Ultimately, the iPod that was revealed that day became a pocket-sized digital music player phenomenon, and would be many gadget fans' favorite always-carry device before smartphones matured enough to make such things redundant. The key claim iPod launched with was that it could put your entire music library in your pocket for $399.

In October 2001, when the iPod launched, Steve Jobs had successfully steered Apple beyond the beige into the Mac OS X era, with iBooks and iMacs well established. A revival of the Cupertino company's fortunes was well underway, with these iDevices doing well among consumers – at a difficult time, not long after the dot-com bubble burst.

Jobs predicted that the “Mac could become the center of your digital lifestyle.” It would do so as a hub uniting digital cameras, digital camcorders, DVD players – and the portable music player. Apple decided to go down this avenue as everyone loves music and it’s a huge target market, without a market leader, reasoned the CEO.

Small companies like Creative and Sonic Blue, and the much larger Sony, already had portable digital music players, acknowledged Jobs. However, “none of them has really found the recipe yet, for digital music,” he told the crowd at the iPod unveiling. At the time of Apple’s iPod announcement, there were four mainstream portable digital music solutions: CD players , MP3 CD players, flash players, and hard disk-based jukebox players.

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