Apple unveiled the first iPod today in 2001 — here's how the world reacted

Ask anyone about the iPod today, and they'll describe it as an iconic gadget — perhaps even one of the most important pieces of personal tech of all time — but the initial reactions to the first iPod's launch two-and-a-half decades ago weren't all overly positive.

Apple unveiled the first version of the portable music player on October 23, 2001, with Steve Jobs promising a "breakthrough digital device" while on stage at Apple's Town Hall auditorium, part of the company's Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino, California — yours for $399 in the US and £349 in the UK.

To mark the 25th anniversary, we're looking back at how the iPod was originally received, including by those who were there at the time. It shows that even the greatest gadgets aren't always recognized as such right away (so there may be hope yet for the Vision Pro).

'1,000 songs in your pocket'

You can still watch the original iPod launch event on YouTube, and it's like stepping into a time machine.

There's plenty of the legendary Steve Jobs charisma on show, as he talks about Apple's new focus on the Mac as a digital hub for photos, videos, and audio — remember this is six years before the iPhone, and at this point in history, Apple had only really made computers, with the occasional accessory.

MP3 players had been available for a number of years when the iPod arrived, but they were niche products. Digital music hadn't yet hit the mainstream, CD ripping was a novel concept, and most people using MP3s were pirating them off the internet (Napster was actually shut down the same year as the iPod arrived, though alternatives sprung up).

The iPod (and iTunes) would be one of the main drivers of the digital music revolution, but not everyone understood Apple's vision right away. Steve Jobs announced the iPod with a flourish, pulling it out of his jeans pocket to emphasize its compact size and promising "1,000 songs in your pocket": it offered a huge amount of storage for the time (5GB), an innovative hardware and software interface, and simple syncing with iTunes on a Mac.

Other MP3 players of the time either offered similar storage capacities with extra bulk, or a smaller size and less capacity. The iPod hit a sweet spot between portability and storage space, helped by a new hard drive from Toshiba, and came with a unique scroll wheel design that made it easier to navigate through thousands of songs, as well as an impressive 10 hours of battery life.

You can get a taste of using it today thanks a new Apple Music easter egg, which has a fully-functional iPod on its "page not found" page.

'It was a mixed reaction'

To get more of a sense of the sentiment at the time, we spoke to Jason Snell, the former editor of Macworld and host of the Designed in California podcast about his memories of the original iPod launch. Snell was there in the Town Hall auditorium on the day, and remembers the press pack being a little confused by a non-Mac Apple product.

"It was a mixed reaction," Snell told us. "The price of $399 was considered to be high, despite the value of being able to fit a thousand songs in your pocket... I think most people just didn't understand what the iPod was. MP3s were only beginning to rise in the public consciousness... Apple actually gave journalists a taped-together cube of CD jewel boxes representing the music it had preloaded on the first iPod."

That's a clever touch from Apple, as it tried to bring its audience along with its vision for what the iPod could be. Snell didn't need much convincing, as his existing MP3 player only held eight songs: "I realized that the music collection on my work computer was only about 3GB in size," he says. "So I could fit every MP3 I'd ever made onto this thing with room to spare, and take it with me on my commute and listen to it as I rode the bus."

A 'glorified consumer gimmick'

You can get a sense of that mixed reaction to the first iPod from the original MacRumors thread from October 23, 2001. It shows that most Apple fans at the time would've much rather seen a new Mac computer announced. The iPod was described as overly expensive, a "glorified consumer gimmick", and "stupid". "Why would they do this?" asks one user.

To be fair to the MacRumors community, there were several notes of positivity too. One commenter said the device "looks really cool", while another recognized that this was "just the beginning" and that the technology would get much better very quickly. The problem was that most people already had CD players, and didn't have a spare $400.

Over at the New York Times, industry analysts recognized the potential of the nascent digital music player market, while questioning how much of an impact the iPod could have without Windows support (iTunes for Windows wouldn't arrive until 2003). NYT columnist David Pogue praised the key features of the iPod, including the speedy FireWire connection, 5GB capacity, and portable size.

Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal described the iPod as "simply the best digital music player I’ve seen", noting that rival players were variously cheaper, smaller, or offered more capacity, but that no other company had managed to package everything together in a single device with as much finesse or appeal as Apple had.

Our sister publication What Hi-Fi? later carried a positive review too. It earned four stars out of five, with the sound quality, screen brightness, compact dimensions, and easy-to-use software singled out as particular selling points for the music player — though the review did note that Creative was selling a player with 20GB of space.

As for Macworld's former editor Jason Snell, a week after the launch he was using the iPod to play music in a hospital delivery room as his wife gave birth to a daughter — and the rest, as they say, is history. Smartphones have since subsumed digital music players to a large extent, and there is no iPod in 2026, but the iconic gadget's place in tech history is guaranteed.