I remember seeing ads for MP3 players and the iPod and not really cluing into what Creative and Apple were hoping to accomplish initially. “Why would you ever want to move away from this relatively stable media format?” (by this time, anti-skip wasassistingthemusic geeks in a big way) I thought to myself, but then that lightbulb went off! Once itbecameapparent that we could simply rip our music and load it on to this little brick, and have it with us wherever we went, I knew I needed to make that leap. My first iPod was an amazing piece of tech and probably could’ve been attached to me surgically (and probably should have been), it wasn’t any more than 16GB of storage, but contained easily a month’s worth of music and I could create my own personal mixes on the fly, it was a slice of heaven for this music geek. The user interface was incredibly intuitive (albeit Monochrome) and easily accessible for the casual user and it was that ease of use that helepd Apple fend off competitors from Creative (they should have stuck with sound cards) and Microsoft (the Zune had potential [read colour] and a few people enjoyed the ability to customize the interface, but the adoption rate wasn’t as high – but the home of the X-Box can consider itself the first Android).

Apple would keep making things easier and easier on the music geeks, incorporating Album Art into their iPod photo models and ultimately would bring video to the device also for those of us who wanted the ability to check out the latest music videos (but remember you had to download the files first). If you went back and told the kid lugging around his cassettes that he would soon be able to carry a far vaster libray in his pocket, you’d have blown his mind.