Farewell to the iPod

The goal of the iPod was to make people want to buy more Macintosh computers. Within a few years, it would change consumer electronics and the music industry and lead to Apple becoming the most valuable company in the world.

The pocket-size rectangle with a white face and polished steel frame was the first to arrive. It was packaged in a custom color and held 1,000 songs.

The iPod generation was created when it exploded in popularity. People wore headphones throughout the 2000s. The iPod was ubiquitous.

Apple said goodbye to all that on Tuesday. The end of production of the iPod Touch brought an end to a two-decade run of products that helped turn Silicon Valley into the epicenter of global capitalism.

According to a venture capital firm, Apple has sold 450 million iPods. It sold three million iPods last year, less than the 250 million it sold.

Apple assured customers that the music would live on, largely through the iPhone, which it introduced in 2007, and Apple Music, a seven-year-old service that testifies to customers' modern preferences. The days of buying and owning 99-cent songs on an iPod are long gone, replaced by monthly subscription offerings that provide access to broader catalogs of music.

The iPod provided a template for Apple for decades, with industrial design, hardware engineering, software development and services. The company was rarely first to market with a new product, but often triumphed.

The first digital music players appeared in the late 1990s. The earliest versions were able to hold a few dozen songs, allowing people who were in the early days of copying CDs onto their computers to transfer those songs into their pockets.

Steve Jobs, who returned to Apple in 1997 after being pushed out more than a decade earlier, viewed the emerging category as an opportunity for giving Apple's legacy computer business modern appeal. A die-hard music fan, who ranked the Beatles and Bob Dylan among his favorite artists, Mr. Jobs thought tapping into people's love of music would help persuade them to switch to Macintoshes from Microsoft-powered personal computers, which had a more than 90 percent market share.

Jon Rubinstein, who led Apple's engineering at the time, said that everyone loved music.

Mr. Rubinstein discovered a new hard disk drive during his trip to Japan. The drive could hold 1,000 songs. It made it possible for a Sony Walkman-size digital player with a capacity multitudes greater than anything that existed in the market.

The development of the iPod coincides with the acquisition of a company that would become the basis for the iTunes digital music store. Mr. Jobs had a vision for how people would purchase music in the digital age.

He said in a 2003 talk that people want to buy their music on the internet just like they did with cassettes.

It was possible for people to share any song with anyone around the world for free at the time. Mr. Jobs leaned into the music industry's troubles by marketing the ability of new Macs to copy CDs with a commercial slogan. Put together. Albhy Galuten, an executive at Universal Music Group, said that the campaign put the music industry in Apple's corner.

The easiest way to fight piracy was with piracy.

The company sold less than 400,000 units in the first year because of the price tag. The iPod Mini came in silver, gold, pink, blue and green. It cost $249 and carried 1,000 songs. Sales went up. In September 2005, it had sold 22 million iPods.

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Apple was able to introduce its brand to millions of new customers by making the iPod Mini available for Windows computers. The maneuver would later be heralded as a stroke of business brilliance, but Mr. Jobs resisted it at the time.

Mr. Rubinstein said that iPods took off like a rocket.

Mr. Jobs wanted Apple to make the iPod bigger and more powerful. Mr. Rubinstein said that the company stopped production of the iPod Mini in order to make room for a cheaper version that cost $200. The company's sales will double to 40 million over the next year.

The iPod's role as a catalyst for the creation of the iPhone was perhaps its most important contribution. Apple executives worried that they were going to be leapfrogged by better technology as mobile phone makers began to introduce devices that could play music. If that were to happen, Mr. Jobs decided that Apple should do it.

The blend of software and services made the iPod successful. The development of the App Store, which allowed people to download and pay for software and services, mirrored the success of the iTunes store, which allowed customers to back up their phones and put music on them.

In 2007, the company changed its name to Apple Computer Inc.

They showed the world they had an atomic bomb, and five years later they had a nuclear arsenal, according to Talal Shamoon, the chief executive of Intertrust Technologies.