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Īs ordered by CEO Steve Jobs, Apple's hardware engineering chief Jon Rubinstein contacted Tony Fadell, a former employee of General Magic and Philips who had a business idea to invent a better MP3 player and build a music sales store to complement it. Apple thought flash memory-based players didn't carry enough songs and the hard drive based ones were too big and heavy so the company decided to develop its own. Portable MP3 players had been around since the mid 1990s, but Apple found existing digital music players "big and clunky or small and useless" with user interfaces that were "unbelievably awful". From left to right: iPod Video, iPod 4th Generation, iPod Mini, iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle. During the middle of 2010, iPhone sales overtook those of the iPod. While the iPhone and iPad have essentially the same media player capabilities as the iPod line, they are generally treated as separate products. As of iOS 5, separate apps named "Music" and "Videos" are standardized across all iOS-powered products. īefore the release of iOS 5, the iPod branding was used for the media player included with the iPhone and iPad, a combination of the Music and Videos apps on the iPod Touch. Prior to macOS 10.15, Apple's iTunes software (and other alternative software) could be used to transfer music, photos, videos, games, contact information, e-mail settings, Web bookmarks, and calendars to the devices supporting these features from computers using certain versions of Apple macOS and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Like other digital music players, some versions of the iPod can serve as external data storage devices. As of May 28, 2019, only the iPod Touch (7th generation) remains in production. The first version was released on October 23, 2001, about 8 + 1⁄ 2 months after the Macintosh version of iTunes was released.
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The iPod is a line of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices designed and marketed by Apple Inc.
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