On: 20 years of the iPod

[thrower123]

The window of people who will be nostalgic about iPods is smaller than those who have nostalgia for 8-track tapes.

It's an entire product category that swept in and had less than a decade of relavence before getting washed out in the tide.

[dehrmann → thrower123]

I guess they were really only relevant for maybe 5 years, ~2005-2010. It primed Apple to make the iPhone (which is huge), but it ended up being a bridge technology between CDs and streaming.

[tomjen3 → dehrmann]

Spotify launched in the US in July 2011, that is well into the smartphone era. By then the iPhone 3g had been out for about 2 years.

[Apocryphon → thrower123]

Without the iPod, there would be no iPhone. Simple as that.

[ghaff → thrower123]

Of course, most people haven't had smartphones for more than a decade at this point. (Certainly not much longer on the outside especially if you exclude Blackberries.) Not that smartphones are likely to evaporate anytime soon.