Apple launched the iPod 23 years ago, and changed the world

You had one. Everybody had an iPod, some people had several, and at the time it seemed as if Apple had somehow thrown a light switch. One moment, almost nobody had any portable music players, and the next they were all wearing those white earbuds.

That isn’t true, of course, because the iPod did take a long time to climb up as high as it got. Yet its ultimate dominance was so total that it used to be hard to imagine a time when there wasn’t an iPod.

It was hard, too, to remember that there were alternatives, but there were many. Apple’s iPod was far from the first music player, and Microsoft’s failed, brown Zune may not even have been its absolute worst rival.

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