Apple is marking the 25th anniversary of the original iPod with a playful, fully interactive Easter egg buried on its Apple Music website. On October 23, 2026 — exactly 25 years after Steve Jobs unveiled the device and promised “1,000 songs in your pocket” — visitors who land on a non-existent page under the music.apple.com domain are greeted by a detailed virtual recreation of the first-generation iPod instead of a standard error message.
The page displays the classic white iPod with its monochrome screen and iconic click wheel, paired with the prompt “Give this a spin instead.” The replica is fully interactive: users can drag or click the click wheel with a mouse, swipe it on a touchscreen, or navigate with arrow keys and Enter on a desktop. Menus include Playlists, Artists, Songs, and Settings, complete with options for shuffle, repeat, backlight timer, and clicker sounds that recreate the familiar tactile feedback of the original hardware.
The virtual library is stocked with more than a thousand tracks heavy on early-2000s hits from artists such as Britney Spears, Coldplay, Alicia Keys, Eminem, Foo Fighters, and others from the era. Playback is limited to standard preview clips — typically 90 seconds for longer songs and 30 seconds for shorter ones — and no Apple Music subscription is required. The experience works only in a web browser; it does not appear inside the Apple Music app on Mac, iPhone, or iPad.
A second, nested Easter egg waits inside the first. Navigate to Settings, then About, and hold the center button for about five seconds. This launches Brick, the Breakout-style game that shipped as a hidden feature on the original 2001 iPod. The game’s presence is a fitting nod to Apple history: Breakout itself was developed in the 1970s with contributions from Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs during their time at Atari.
The tribute arrives on a day of particular symmetry. Jobs introduced the original 5 GB iPod on October 23, 2001, at Apple’s Infinite Loop campus, launching a product that reshaped portable music and helped pave the way for the iPhone and modern streaming services. Apple discontinued the last iPod models in 2022, making the browser-based revival a rare, low-key celebration of one of the company’s most influential devices.
MacDailyNews Note: To use the virtual iPod, simply visit any invalid URL on the Apple Music site — such as music.apple.com/404 or any random path that triggers a 404 — and the interactive iPod appears. The feature is free, requires no login, and has already been widely shared by users rediscovering the simple pleasure of spinning a click wheel. Whether it remains a permanent fixture or a temporary anniversary stunt is unclear, but for one day at least, the original iPod is back in your pocket — or, more accurately, in your browser.
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Brick is impossible to play on a virtual track wheel.
Now that is cool. That early 2000s Y2K era “futurism” seems so quaint now with all of the new things that have been invented in the past 25 years so it feels like a breath of fresh air to see at least a digital version of the original iPod on the browser. Nicely done on Apple’s part.