The beginning of the iPod Classic line actually dates back to the original iPod released in 2001. Now at this time, Apple was still enjoying the success of their iMac and was looking to follow it up with another hit product, and they put their money on the iPod. A device that was miles ahead of any other music player on the market.
And that's part of the reason why Apple decided to release a portable music player, they saw a huge gap in the industry and recognized it was ripe for disruption. Now I should mention that the first generation iPod wasn’t actually called the iPod classic. It wasn’t until the last generation when Apple finally gave the iPod line the Classic suffix. Now there are a total of six generations of iPod Classic, including several special edition models. And despite the design and functionality differences of every generation, they all had one thing in common - a 1.8 inch hard drive that was incredibly thin and compact. And it was this component that allowed for the first iPod model to be created, because up to that point, there hadn’t been a high-capacity hard drive small enough to fit inside a pocketable device. So the original iPod’s hard drive had a capacity of 5GB, or about 1,000 songs. And we’re going to find out how the iPod went from 1,000 songs in your pocket in 2001, to 32,000 songs in your pocket by 2007.
