Brief Information About Apple’s First Generation iPod

This brief paper informs about Apple’s first-generation iPod. It addresses its chief parts and function. This ties to its significant impact to music history as well as inspiring the advancements of the iPhone and iPad. It was not the first device to allow portable music play, but it was the device that worked the best.

Since the day it was revealed to the world, the iPod changed the way human beings listen to music. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Inc., asked “why music?” as his company at the time was only known for their Mac computers. [1] The response was simply “Well, we love music.” [1] MP3 was the new wave for music lovers to gain easy access to music from the internet due to illegal file-sharing sites such as Napster. On January 2001, iTunes was created to draw the bridge between songs from the computer to a portable MP3 player. Jobs capitalized on the appalling portable mp3 players around by promoting the first generation iPod to help sell more Mac computers. Unlike its competitors, it was slim compared to the size of an audio cassette. To turn the iPod on, you can press any button. If a song is not playing, it will automatically turn off after two minutes. If you need to turn it off immediately, you will have to hold the “play” button for a few seconds. It features a scroll wheel, that physically turns to adjust the volume, scroll for a song, and navigate through the menus.

The wheel was surrounded by four buttons which were the following in clockwise direction from the top: menu, forward, pause/play and backwards. [2] In the middle was the centre button to select an item. The principal parts include a Lucite front panel, LCD (liquid-crystal display), logic board, hard drive, internal recyclable Lithium-Ion battery, and finally a metal backing. [4] At the top of the front panel, you will see the headphone port, and a firewall connection (IEEE 1394a port) for syncing music and charging the iPod. [3]

Next to it, you have access to the Hold switch, so if you don’t want it to be operating accidentally when travelling, it makes the button inert.The front panel and metal backing are of course to protect the interior parts. The hard drive stores the music in the iPod. The brains behind the iPod is the logic board. It’s the one that reads the music from the hard drive, convert it to sound that you are able to hear, let the user know if the battery is low or fully charged, recognize the user’s actions by the buttons or scroll wheel used, as well as allow the music travel through the headphones.