A Look Back at PCMag's First iPod Review

pcmag.com:

Today, Apple Inc. is a trillion-dollar company, and it was the first-ever to hit that valuation. It wasn't always that way. Whereas this year it had a fiscal Q3 profit of $21.7 billion (with a B) and most of us yawn, 20 years ago its third-quarter profits were only $66 million. That's an increase of times 328!

Arguably, that all changed because of the iPod, which Apple is now discontinuing after a 20-year run.

Yeah, sure, the iPhone and iPad are the real moneymakers now. But without the iPods of yore, which accounted for as much as 44% of Apple's almost always growing profits in some years, would the iOS products even exist?

Don't forget that Apple Computer, as it was known at the time, despite always having a gift for marketing, was considered an also-ran in the computer space it originally occupied. In a commentary by Matthew Rothenberg of Interactive Week at the time (he used to work at MacWeek and broke the news in 2002 that the iPad was coming), he called Apple "the perennial longshot in the PC race" despite it beating financial predictions.

A week later, on October 26, 2001, Rothenberg seemed even less rosy about Apple's new toy. He likened the announcement by Steve Jobs of the first iPod to Apple's "finely honed marketing sword nearly lopped off a couple of the company's fingers." This followed a week of the web frothing at the mouth trying to parse what Apple could be announcing because its event invite said cryptically: "Hint: It's not a Mac." The reaction was the kind of "theological fervor that PC rivals such as Compaq Computer or Dell Computer can only dream of," said Rothenberg. Most Apple rivals can still dream on today.

History has shown the iPod was a game-changer for Apple, and the world, since the