Ten years ago, Apple Computer made a left turn into digital music players and discovered a superhighway to success. Rik Myslewski looks back at the last decade to show…

Most folks say that May 6, 1998 -- the day that Steve Jobs introduced the then-revolutionary iMac to a wowed Cupertino crowd -- was the day that Apple was reborn. They’re wrong.

The iMac did indeed pull Apple Computer out of its seemingly irreversible death spiral, but the computer maker remained a small player in a field dominated by others. The day that today’s Apple was born occurred 10 years ago this month.

On October 23, 2001, Steve Jobs pulled a 6.5-ounce chunk of stainless steel, white plastic, and electronic goodness out of his left jeans pocket, introducing a crowd of reporters to the iPod. That moment began the transformation of Apple Computer into the company that Jobs renamed on January 9, 2007, when he told a Macworld Expo crowd, “The Mac, iPod, Apple TV, and iPhone. Only one of those is a computer. So we’re changing the name.”

To simply Apple.

Knowing as we do now how the original iPod and its successors went on to dominate the then-nascent market for digital music players, it’s hard to remember that the little white brick was tepidly received. At $399, it was expensive. In its first incarnation, it lacked an equalizer. Its open FireWire port was a pocket-lint magnet. Its earbuds were, to be kind, suboptimal. And in a Windows-dominated world, its Mac-only syncing was a market-limiting millstone.

But one by one, all of those objections were overcome, and the iPod -- mini, photo, shuffle, nano, touch, classic -- went on to become wildly successful. As it did, Apple transformed itself from a computer maker into what Steve Jobs described late last year as “a very high-volume consumer-electronics manufacturer” that listed its hardware line in a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as the “iPhone, iPad, Mac, iPod, Apple TV.” Note the reordering of those offerings since Jobs’ 2007 renaming.

That same SEC filing reported that Apple earned $5.1 billion from Mac sales between April and June of this year. Its consumer-electronics line -- the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and li’l ol’ Apple TV -- brought in $21.2 billion. Of that haul, the iPod -- now well past its prime -- earned a mere $1.3 billion.

Rik’s original iPod: old, but still at play.

It may be fading, but the iPod blazed Apple’s resurgent trail. Without its success, there may have never been an iPhone, let alone an iPad. And there may have never been the revival of the Mac, which continues month after month to far outpace the sales growth of Windows-based PCs.

But there was one other sea change that the iPod unleashed, one that was not-too-subtly hinted at in a warning printed in English, French, German, and Japanese on the plastic wrapping of that first 5GB iPod of late 2001: “Don’t steal music.” Nice sentiment, but it didn’t work.

When Napster appeared in June 1999, it taught the music-consuming masses that tunes could be freely, easily, and speedily passed around the internet. Individual songs were liberated from filler-filled albums -- legally or illegally, but mostly illegally -- musicians could distribute their creations without label-controlling middlemen, and millions of iPods could pump those tunes over thin white cables into uncomfortable white earbuds, feeding the auditory canals of a new generation
of consumers.

In 1999, the U.S. music industry raked in $14.6 billion. By 2010, that had dropped $6.3 billion. The day that the iPod was introduced, Apple’s stock price was $9.07 per share. Today it’s hovering around $400. At the iPod’s tenth birthday, we’re celebrating. The Recording Industry Association of America?

Not so much.

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Since the late 1980s, Rik Myslewski has paid his rent by keeping an eye on Apple. He was editor-in-chief of MacAddict from 2001 until its transformation into Mac|Life in early 2007, and is now a member of the snarkily sophisticated team at London’s The Register, which is “biting the hand that feeds IT” daily at www.theregister.co.uk.