Apple dealt a deadly blow this week when they announced the iPod, originally released in 2001, will be no more. While its memory lives on via features now standard to the casual listening experience (playlists, play counts, and most famously, the shuffle button), there’s one iPod feature that we can’t dare to forget: the “silhouette” commercials. Debuted in the early 2000s alongside the 3rd and 4th generation iPod Classics, Apple’s most iconic line of ads featured silhouette figures moving and grooving in front of candy-colored backgrounds and of course, their white corded headphones. One of our favorite songs to set the soundtrack for a silhouette commercial was “Technologic” by Daft Punk. It’s like a time capsule for its 2005 release ...
It’s difficult to underestimate how deeply and completely the iPod revolutionized music listening. Introduced in 2001, the pocket-sized device escorted music consumers out of the CD era and into the gleaming digital age. (“I don’t know who your product’s designers are,” Moby said in a 2001 promotional video from Apple, “but boy, you’re not paying them enough.”) Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Of course, iPod commercials quickly became as iconic as the products they sold. Launched in 2003, the classic iPod ad campaign featured silhouettes of people dancing like mad in front of brightly colored backgrounds, with the iPod and its headphones in stark white contrast. These clips are deeply embedded in the memories of most anyone who watched televisi...
For the better part of the last decade, the Apple iPod has been more of a nostalgia item or the first smart device for children than a must-have item. Today, it has finally been discontinued and will only be available “while supplies last.” While the move hardly comes out of nowhere — the iPod Classic was discontinued back in 2014, and Apple last updated the iPod Touch in 2019 — it will strike a chord with older millennials who have rose-colored memories of loading their MP3 collections into iTunes. Sure, the click wheels on the early models would sometimes stick, and the spinning hard drives would die without warning, but being able to carry thousands of songs in one’s pocket was a groundbreaking moment in technology. Of course, the iPod wasn’t the first portable MP3 player, but it c...