Like millions of others, my first Apple device was an iPod. To be specific, the 2nd-generation iPod Classic. I can’t recall the exact date I got it, but it was pre-owned and it must have been sometime around late 2003. It was scratched, monochrome and I lost the iconic white headphones early on. But that little white brick changed everything for me.
It’s hard to overstate how mind-blowing it was to have that much music available all at once in a single gadget. There was no need to carry a stack of cassettes or CDs around with you just to listen to a different album. I was team Sony at the time, owning both a Discman CD player and an MZ-R70 MiniDisc Player. But with both of those formats, you had to plan ahead what you wanted to listen to before leaving the house. The iPod and MP3s changed all that.
