The iPod is 25 years old. On October 23, 2001, Steve Jobs introduced “a breakthrough digital device that’s not a Mac” and pulled out a $399 music player that could put 1,000 songs in your pocket. To mark the anniversary, Apple has hidden a playable, virtual iPod inside the Apple Music website.
The Apple Music Easter egg
Engadget found that if you load a page that doesn’t exist on the Apple Music website, the usual “page not found” message now sits above a fully interactive version of the original iPod and the words “give this a spin instead.” The click wheel and controls work, and you can browse Playlists, Artists, Songs and Settings in a library of 1,029 playable songs, heavy on early-2000s artists like Baha Men, blink-182 and Eminem. Each track plays for up to 90 seconds.
Notebookcheck spotted that you can even play Brick, the Breakout-style game that was a real hidden extra on the first iPod. Just like on the original, you open it by holding the center button on the About screen for a few seconds. The virtual iPod doesn’t seem to need an Apple Music subscription, and Engadget recommends trying it on a phone or tablet, where the touch screen makes the click wheel feel closer to the real thing; on desktop, it didn’t always load.
What made the first iPod special
The original iPod used a 1.8-inch Toshiba hard drive with 5GB of storage, enough for 1,000 songs at 160Kbps, which Jobs called “for most people, their entire music library.” It measured 2.4 x 4 x 0.78 inches, about the size of a deck of cards, and weighed 6.5 ounces. It connected and charged over FireWire, which Apple said could copy a whole CD to the iPod in five to 10 seconds and fill it in about 10 minutes, compared with hours over the USB of the time. Its battery lasted 10 hours of continuous music, and it synced automatically with iTunes 2, which launched the same day.
The iPod’s design did a lot of the work, too: a mechanical scroll wheel for one-handed browsing by playlist, artist or song, and an interface simple enough that most people never opened the manual. According to Tom’s Hardware, the first song Apple played on stage was “Building a Mystery” by Sarah McLachlan.
How the story ended
The iPhone arrived in 2007, and the two lived side by side in Apple’s lineup for more than a decade. The last new iPod was the 7th-generation iPod touch in May 2019, and Apple officially discontinued the line in May 2022.
The bottom line
Twenty-five years after it changed how people carried music, the iPod lives on as an Easter egg: open a broken Apple Music link on your phone and you can spin the click wheel again, for free, for as long as Apple keeps it there.
Sources: Engadget, Tom’s Hardware
