The iPod: 10 years young

From the wars in Asia, Africa and Latin America to the economic problems facing most of the world, there is much to bemoan about the last decade.

Sometimes, though, one sees or hears something that serves as a powerful reminder of the vast progress humanity has made lately.

For me, one such moment occurred Sunday, when I read that the first iPod was introduced on that date in 2001.

When I clicked the link that led to an archived New York Times article about the device’s debut, I was struck by the comparative primitiveness of the product being described. The article’s headline was priceless: “Apple Introduces What It Calls an Easier to Use Portable Music Player.”

“The iPod, which will sell for $399 when it becomes available on Nov. 10, is something of a hybrid of existing products. At 4 inches by just under 2.5 inches and just over three-quarters of an inch thick, it is as small as flash players, but it has a 5-gigabyte hard drive, large enough to store 1,000 songs.”

I was astonished at the iPod’s thickness. I had completely forgotten iPods used to be that clunky. The current iPod Classic, the successor to the original iPod, is roughly the same length and width as the original, which makes sense from an ease-of-use standpoint, but it is barely half as thick, at 0.41 inch.

More important than physical size, of course, are battery life, memory and price. The original model’s battery offered 10 hours of audio playback and no video capability, and the current model provides 40 hours of audio playback and 7 hours of video.

Memory, of course, has ballooned, with the current iPod Classic boasting a 160-gigabyte hard drive, 32 times greater than that of the original.

Apple has not only managed to fit all of these improvements, and many others, into a slimmer device; it has also managed to offer them at a much lower price.

According to the Minneapolis Federal Reserve’s inflation calculator, the original model would cost about $508 in today’s dollars, which makes it more than twice as expensive as today’s $249 model.

This means iPod consumers were paying an inflation-adjusted $101.60 per gigabyte of memory in 2001, whereas they’re paying $1.56 now.

Comparing cost of battery life for audio playback, we see a 2001 cost of $50.80 per hour and a current cost of $6.23 per hour (not per hour of use, but of capability).

None of the above even addresses other astonishing improvements, such as the transition from a monochromatic screen with no album art to a beautiful color display and the change from a click wheel that actually turned and had four other buttons surrounding it to one that stays still while sensing the motion of the user’s fingers and incorporates the four other buttons into itself.

I’ve compared the original iPod only to its current incarnation in order to come as close as possible to making apples-to-apples comparisons when looking at the price buyers pay for certain features. Comparing the first iPod to the iPhone 4S would, of course, yield even more surprising contrasts.

The positive impact of these dramatic improvements has unfortunately been dampened slightly by a drop in the median United States household income, which fell 4.9 percent between 2001 and 2010, from an inflation-adjusted $52,005 to an inflation-adjusted $49,445.

While the iPod is an exceptional product from the last 10 years, there are parallels
throughout many
industries.

Laptops have become far more powerful, useful and affordable, and automobiles in virtually all price ranges now offer features that only the luxury brands offered 10 years ago, if they had even been
invented yet.

I don’t mean to downplay the negative impact of the recent recession or to claim that cheaper, better iPods are undeniable proof that we are better off than we were 10
years ago.

However, I do believe it is important, from time to time, to call attention to examples of progress when one sees them, especially when the gains are as mind-boggling as those Apple has brought us with the iPod.

­— jarlower@indiana.edu