“Jobs explained to the crowd that had gathered at Apple headquarters for the iPod’s launch: ‘Why music? Well, we love music, and it’s always good to do something you love.’ On this Thursday, October 23, 2001, Apple was announcing what would turn out to be its most successful product. The iPod struggled past the battery problem to offer as much as 10 hours of playing time between charges. Inside was 32 MB of memory – more than most Palm Pilots. And by being built around a 5 GB hard drive instead of the widely used flash memory, the iPod offered enough storage for 1000 songs,” Jeffrey Young and William Simon write int heir book, “iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business,” excerpted for The Sydney Morning Herald.

“‘Apple has invented a whole new category of digital music player that lets you put your entire music collection in your pocket and listen to it wherever you go,’ Jobs bragged. ‘Isn’t this cool?’ he asked the crowd, demonstrating how painless the designers had made it to transfer songs. ‘With iPod, listening to music will never be the same again.’ Early sales were encouraging but not exactly breakaway. It wasn’t until Christmas 2002, when 200,000 iPods were sold, that sales began to kick in to high gear,” Young and Simon write. “The little pocket music player was vastly outselling Apple’s core product, the Macintosh, and Jobs began predicting that iPod and the iTunes Music Store would be accounting for half the company’s revenue. Steve Jobs had found a goldmine.”

“With the music business, Steve Jobs was finally having his day. He came along when the industry was in a paroxysm of shrinking revenues, downsizing work forces, and the threat of extinction from an apparently unstoppable force called downloading. An outsider, not even a fan of today’s music, Steve had done the almost unthinkable: he had changed the face of a second industry,” Young and Simon write.

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: This article is required reading for anyone interested in Apple Computer, Inc.

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