The iPod made the iPhone possible

Image: Apple, via John Schroter on YouTube

The iPod Touch, Apple's last product with theiPod name, will be discontinued. It can be hard to remember just how important the original iPod was to Apple after more than 20 years. The music player helped define the company and brought it back from the brink of ruin.

The story of Apple's comeback has been told many times, so I will try to keep it brief. The company was almost bankrupt in the 1990s. The iMac G3 was selling well, and Apple's revenue was starting to grow again. Apple was still a niche player in the consumer electronics market despite the original iMac stabilizing the company.

The iPod can be entered. Steve Jobs introduced a portable music player in October 2001 that held 1,000 mp3 songs on a 5gigabyte hard drive. It wasn't the first portable media player, but one of the iPod's first commercials showed why you'd want one: with just a few clicks, you could take your computer.

Apple introduced more models and supported Windows in the next few years. According to Statista, Apple sold 400,000 iPods in 2002. By 2006 Apple was selling 39 million of them a year. The general public is familiar with Apple as a company that makes products you carry around in your pocket.

The sales kept growing. The company would sell over 50 million in 2007. The next big thing was the iPhone.

Steve Jobs says that the first thing he will say about the phone is that it is an iPod with touch controls.

When the iPhone first came out, you had to set it up in order to use it. Jobs used that as a selling point when he introduced it, saying that iPod owners would know how to set up their phone and have their data already in iTunes. After you set the phone up, you'll see an app called iPod on it that depicts a classic scrollwheel-adorned device.

The App Store came to define the iPhone despite not being one of its original features. Apple had half a decade of experience building and maintaining a digital storefront by the time it launched. The iTunes Music Store was launched in 2003 as a way to purchase digital music for your iPod. In 2006 Apple started selling movies on its online store, as it built out its infrastructure for portable media consumption. It's hard to imagine what the iPod would look like without it.

The iPod doesn't deserve credit for everything that the iPhone did. It had games, but they weren't one of the main selling points. Despite a joke by Steve Jobs, the click wheel was largely replaced by the touch screen.

The days of Apple being known for its iPod were numbered after the introduction of the iPhone. Consumers bought 23 million iPods in the first quarter of 2009. Those would have been second-gen iPods, first- and second-gen iPod Touches, fourth-gen iPods, and the iPod Classic.

The iPod wouldn't reach those heights again. Fewer and fewer people bought iPods as the sales of the iPhone took off. In 2010 Apple introduced the iPad, a device that it had dreamed up as a touchscreen device before it came up with the idea for the iPhone. Within two years, it was outselling the iPod. For most people, the iPad is even better than the iPod Touch because it is a phone without the phone.

Over the next decade, the iPod's importance at Apple continued to diminish. By 2015, Apple's earnings reports lumped the iPod into a category with the Apple TV, Apple Watch, and third-party accessories. The iPod Touch was the last iPod to be sold in 2022, followed by the iPod Nano and Shuffle.

It's hard to imagine that Apple sold many seventh-gen iPod Touches over the past few years, but there are sure to be a few people that will miss it when I go to my local Apple Store on Tuesday. It was the cheapest new device you could buy from Apple. The entry-level iPad starts at $329 for a 64GB model. The Touch was the last easily pocketable device that Apple sold.

The legacy of the iPod is still going strong. You can draw a lot of lines from the iPod lineup to what Apple is doing today, both with its streaming service and Air Pod lineup. Apple named an entire iPod model after video, now it has an Apple TV Plus, and sells the iPhone on its video prowess. Remember the time people wore the iPods as a watch?

The iPhone is Apple's biggest money-maker, even though services, Wearables, and accessories are important to the company. That type of success doesn't come down to any one factor, it happens thanks to a decade-plus-long series of good decisions and solid marketing. Thanks to the success of the iPod, Apple was able to make the iPhone, and a lot of that happened.