iPod turns seven

Miss out on a seven year old’s birthday, and you’ll likely find yourself in some hot water one way or the other. But while October 23rd is more or less permanently burned into my brain as the day the iPod launched back in 2001, its passing this week didn’t even register until a few days after the fact when I was glancing at my calendar and suddenly thought “oops.”

Yep, the iPod turned seven this week and it went right over my head. But I got away with it, I suppose, because no one else seemed to notice the occasion either. Talk about a non-event. Of course the seventh anniversary of something, simply by virtue of being an oddball number, isn’t as likely to be noticed as, say, the fifth anniversary of the iTunes Store that we marked earlier this year. But maybe it’s something else. Simply put: is the iPod still all that relevant?



Those are difficult words for me to type, seeing as how I was there back in October of 2001, buying my first iPod even though I really couldn’t afford one at the time. After all, it was the product I never knew I’d always wanted: imagine a thousand songs in my pocket! Up until that point the most songs I’d been able to get onto my CD walkman was about seventeen, and that thing didn’t even fit in my pocket.

The iPod has come a long way since then, with the full-size iPod now holding thirty times that many songs despite being noticeably more svelte (to say nothing of its massive amount of accumulated new features), and of course you can now fit half the original iPod’s capacity onto the lapel pin known as the iPod shuffle. We won’t talk about the fact that my current iPhone barely holds twice as many songs as the original seven-year old iPod. But come to think of it, that’s what this is really about, isn’t it?



Sure, the iPod is still shipping. And if you combine all of the various iPod models together I’d imagine they’re still collectively outselling the iPhone, even with the rather steep incline in iPhone sales going forward that this past week’s quarterly sales numbers would seem to suggest. So the iPod might still be outselling the iPhone. But so what? Toasters outsell the iPhone, and no one spends much time talking about that particular product.



Not that I mean to imply that the iPod has somehow become as passe as the toaster. After all, you should see the cool browning knob my new toaster has. But in all seriousness, you have to ask who all is still buying these iPods. Because at this point you have to assume that with the exception of the random impulsive $49 iPod shuffle buy, you’ve got to figure that most iPod purchases are made only after the customer has at least briefly considered – and then rejected – the iPhone. Not that most iPod resellers actually have the iPhone sitting there in stock next to the iPod. But how many people go shopping for an iPod these days without at an awareness that the iPhone exists?



For various reasons, millions of folks still end up with the iPod anyway. And this is not to belittle them in any way; if the iPhone didn’t exist I’d still be happily toting my iPod nano all over town (while cursing my third-party cell phone for being so crappy just like in the good old days). But what I’m getting at is that the people who are buying iPods these days are more or less making a decision not to be on the cutting edge. Even those who buy an iPod touch are doing so because they are in effect trying to get in on the iPhone platform without actually buying the “phone” part.


And like I said, there’s really nothing wrong with any of that. Except that by definition, then, the iPod is no longer a cutting edge product. And maybe that’s why no one, including me, bothered to even stop and look at the calendar when the iPod reached its seventh anniversary this past week.