iPod (1st generation)

Apple announced the iPod on October 23, 2001, six weeks after September 11 and into a market that already had MP3 players nobody much liked. It held 5GB on a 1.8-inch Toshiba hard drive, which Apple described as a thousand songs in your pocket, and that phrase did more work than any specification on the box. The scroll wheel physically turned. You spun it with a thumb to move through a list, and because scrolling accelerated the further you went, a thousand songs stopped being an unmanageable number. FireWire moved a full CD across in about ten seconds where USB 1.1 rivals took minutes. It cost $399 and worked only with a Mac, which at the time was about 5 percent of the computer market, and Slashdot's verdict was that it would flop. It did not. Apple sold 125,000 in the first quarter and rather more once Windows support arrived.