I never owned an iPod Mini. Even as a college freshman back at the time of its introduction, I was already more of a full-size iPod kind of nerd. Mine was the third-gen model with the backlit buttons, which I maintain was the best version ever released. I wanted the most storage possible for the flourishing music collection that I’d amassed through years of painfully slow downloads over Napster, LimeWire, and Usenet groups. (There were some legal iTunes purchases mixed in there, I promise.)
But by 2004, the iPod had a starting price of $299 and could run as high as $399. Apple needed to offer a music player that many more people could afford. And that came in 2004, the year of the first-ever iPod Mini.
Onstage at Macworld, Steve Jobs claimed the iPod had reached a 31 percent share of the MP3 player market. But the company was eager to carve out a much bigger portion of the pie, and doing so meant taking on significantly cheaper MP3 players from the likes of Rio, Dell, iRiver, Creative, and other brands — all of which are faint memories today.
During his presentation, Jobs split the flash MP3 player market into two segments: over $100 and under $100. The iPod Mini was Apple’s answer for that over-$100 grouping. (The company would eventually tackle the lower segment with the first iPod Shuffle.) Apple priced the Mini at $249, still expensive but substantially cheaper than the regular iPod.
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This New York Times review from David Pogue really does a beautiful job of illustrating the Mini’s competition at the time and just how different the tech world was. The Creative Zen Micro let you record FM radio stations — not just listen to them. Meanwhile, Virgin sold an MP3 player with two headphone jacks for shared listening with a friend. Oh, and let us not forget that legal digital music was all DRM’d to hell at the time, while MP3s offered universal playback no matter what player you bought.
Apple didn’t need any strange gimmicks to sell iPods. The Mini ran the same software as Apple’s flagship player and offered full compatibility with a massive spread of accessories that worked with its 30-pin dock connector. “We think this is what it takes to take your library with you and not have to fret,” Jobs said of the Mini’s 4GB hard drive, which (by Apple’s count) stored 1,000 songs in your pocket. The aluminum-covered device came in several 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 back casing of regular iPods, which scuffed no matter how carefully you babied the device.
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While the Mini shared a lot in common with past iPods, it did introduce one significant change: the click wheel. Faced with limited room for controls, Apple decided to combine the circular touch wheel and various music control buttons into a single interface that debuted on the Mini and would carry forward through the very last iPod Classic. It was a brilliant solution. The iPod Mini got off to a strong start with over 100,000 preorders. Apple would later release a second-generation model with a much longer battery life and more storage.
But the Mini’s time in the spotlight was short-lived. At Macworld 2005, it was succeeded by the iPod Nano. The Nano would sell for the same $249 price and still held 1,000 songs in your pocket, but this time, the hardware was tiny enough to be tucked into a coin pocket — a true showcase of Apple’s engineering. The Nano would be joined by the first-generation iPod Shuffle, which was the first iPod to sell for under $100. The duo gave Apple a two-pronged approach to finally conquer the market of flash-based MP3 players.
It was the iPod Nano that would carry forward 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 would become so wildly popular in the years to follow. It was an important step that gave us the click wheel and finally some color. And it helped to grow the iPod’s sales dominance even further. But more importantly, it showed Apple the importance of going smaller — both in size and price. That strategy would extend to the iPod Nano and Shuffle for a handful of years, offering people some kind of iPod regardless of budget.
Eventually, modern smartphones wiped out the need for standalone music players altogether. Apple celebrated 100 million iPods sold in April 2007 — just a couple months before the first iPhone went on sale. Once it did, everyone realized the convenience of a single do-everything device, and there was no going back. The full-size iPod Classic was discontinued in 2014; the Nano and Shuffle would follow in 2017, and Apple bid farewell to the iPod brand altogether in 2022. Nowadays, there’s been an iPod renaissance of sorts as people seek a reprieve from music subscriptions and phone notifications, but it’s nothing like the heyday of a simpler time in tech — when music players were music players and you could truly have all your songs right there in your pocket.
