I never owned an iPod Mini. Even as a college freshman, I was more of a full-size iPod nerd at the time of its introduction. Mine was the third generation model with the backlit keys, which in my opinion was the best version ever released. I wanted the most storage space possible for the burgeoning music collection I had amassed through years of painfully slow downloads via Napster, LimeWire, and Usenet groups. (There was some There are also legal iTunes purchases in there, I promise.)
But in 2004, the iPod had a starting price of $299 and could go up to $399. Apple needed to offer a music player that many more people could afford. And that happened in 2004, the year of the very first iPod Mini.
On stage at Macworld, Steve Jobs claimed that the iPod had achieved a 31 percent share of the MP3 player market. But the company was eager to carve out a much larger slice of the pie, and that meant taking on much cheaper MP3 players from Rio, Dell, iRiver, Creative and other brands – all things now only dimly remembered.
During his presentation, Jobs divided the flash MP3 player market into two segments: over $100 and under $100. The iPod Mini was Apple's answer to this $100+ grouping. (The company would eventually attack the lower segment with the first iPod Shuffle.) Apple priced the Mini at $249, which is still expensive but significantly cheaper than the regular iPod.
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The New York Times David Pogue's review beautifully illustrates the Mini's competition at the time and shows how different the world of technology was. The Creative Zen Micro allows you to record FM radio stations – not just listening. Meanwhile, Virgin sold an MP3 player with two headphone jacks for sharing listening with a friend. Oh, and let's not forget that legal digital music at the time was fully DRM'd, while MP3s allowed universal playback no matter what player you bought.
Apple didn't need any weird gimmicks to sell iPods. The Mini ran the same software as Apple's flagship player and offered full compatibility with a variety of accessories that worked with its 30-pin dock connector. “We think this is what you need to take your library with you and not have to worry,” Jobs said of the Mini's 4GB hard drive, which (according to Apple) holds 1,000 songs in your library bag were stored. The aluminum-covered device came in multiple colors—a first for any iPod—and exuded more personality than the all-white iPod. It was also far more scratch-resistant than the polished steel backs of regular iPods, which scuffed no matter how carefully you handled the device.
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Although the Mini shared many similarities with earlier iPods, it did introduce one major change: the click wheel. Given the limited scope for controls, Apple decided to combine the circular touch wheel and various music control buttons into a single interface, first introduced on the Mini and also adopted on the very last iPod Classic. It was a brilliant solution. The iPod Mini got off to a strong start with over 100,000 pre-orders. Apple would later release a second-generation model with significantly longer battery life and more storage.
But the Mini's time in the spotlight was short-lived. The iPod Nano followed at Macworld 2005. Sold at the same price of $249, the Nano still had room for 1,000 songs in its pocket, but this time the hardware was tiny enough to be stored in a coin pocket – a true example of Apple's engineering prowess. The Nano was joined by the first generation iPod Shuffle, which was the first iPod to be sold for under $100. The duo gave Apple a two-pronged approach to finally conquer the flash-based MP3 player market.
It was the iPod Nano, which continued through multiple generations and different designs. Ultimately, the iPod Mini became a bridge between Apple's iconic full-size iPod and the Nano and Shuffle models that gained so much popularity in the following years. It was an important step that gave us the click wheel and finally some color. And it helped expand the iPod's sales dominance even further. But more importantly, it showed Apple the importance of going smaller – both in size and price. This strategy would extend to the iPod Nano and the Shuffle for a few years and offer something to people some Kind of iPod, regardless of budget.
Ultimately, modern smartphones completely eliminated the need for standalone music players. Apple celebrated 100 million iPod sales in April 2007 – just a few months before the first iPhone came onto the market. Once it did, everyone realized the convenience of having a single device that could do everything, and there was no going back. The full-size iPod Classic was discontinued in 2014; The Nano and the Shuffle followed in 2017, and in 2022 Apple said goodbye to the iPod brand entirely. There's something of an iPod renaissance going on these days, as people seek a break from music subscriptions and phone notifications, but that's nothing like the heyday of a simpler time in technology – when music players were still music players and you could actually have all your songs right there bag could have.