Steve Jobs unleased the iPod onto an unsuspecting public on October 23, 2001. It had been just under a year in the making under the supervision of apple's cheif of hardware engineering, Jon Rubinstein, and with a 5GB hard drive it was much smaller than today's models. Here is a brief history of the worlds favourite mp3 player....

Apple Computers was founded in Los Gatos, California on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, to sell the Apple I personal computer kit at $666.66. They were hand-built in Jobs' parents' garage, and the Apple I was first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club. Jobs and Wozniak, had been friends since 1971....

iTunes is a digital media player application, developed by Apple Computer, for playing and organizing digital music and video files. The program is also the interface to manage the music on Apple's popular iPod digital audio player. Additionally, iTunes can connect to the iTunes Music Store (sometimes referred to as "iTMS") which allows users to purchase digital music and movie files that can be played by iPods and iTunes...

On January 6, 2004, apple introduced the first iPod mini. It had 4 GB of storage and a retail price of $249, only $50 below the 15 GB third-generation iPod. Again critics panned it as too expensive yet it proved to be so overwhelmingly popular that stores had difficulty keeping up with demand....

On September 7, 2005 apple announced the successor to the mini, the iPod nano. Based on the same flash memory used in the shuffle the nano is a mere 0.27 inches (6.9 millimeters) thick, weighs 1.5 ounces (42 grams), and is 62% smaller by volume than its predecessor. It has a 65,536 color display that can show photographs...

On October 12, 2005, Apple announced at the "One more thing..." event, the fifth-generation iPod, which featured the ability to play MPEG-4 and H.264 video with resolutions of up to 480 x 480 and 320 x 240 respectively (videos purchased from the iTunes Music Store are limited to 320 x 240.) Some users have reported the ability to play widescreen resolutions up to 640x360 using MPEG-4 and 400x192 using H.264. The new models are available in 30 and 60 GB capacities and are priced the same as the previous generation at $299 and $399 USD, respectively. However, the 30 and 60 GB versions differ in body thickness with the 30 GB version being slightly thinner.

On January 11, 2005 at the Macworld Expo apple announced the release of the iPod shuffle with the taglines "Life is random" and "Give chance a chance". Instead of the hard drives used on other iPods the shuffle used the more appropriate flash memory. The shuffle is available in two models, the 512 MB and 1 GB version. Unlike other iPod models, the shuffle cannot play apple Lossless or AIFF encoded audio although some regard it as having one of the best-sounding audio systems of all the iPod models.