How iTunes Shaped the Apple of Today
MACSTORIES EXTRAS
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How iTunes Shaped the Apple of Today
25 years ago, Apple introduced iTunes, an app for managing your digital music collection that evolved into a media jack-of-all-trades in the years that followed. It’s hard to overstate iTunes’ importance to today’s Apple, even though it’s been years since the app last existed on any of its hardware. iTunes’ story is a reflection of the modern history of Apple itself, shifting from a company that made software to support hardware sales to one where software just as often sells Apple’s services. So for this week’s MacStories Extra column, I thought I’d look back at some pivotal points in iTunes’ history and consider how it helped shape Apple and music itself.
Few apps have had such a profound effect on Apple as iTunes, which is really saying something for an app that started its life as SoundJam MP, a third-party Mac-only app for organizing your music. However, not long after iTunes’ January 2001 launch, the first iPod was introduced, and the two together became an unstoppable force in the years to come by making it easy to copy your CDs and load them onto your iPod, leading Apple to take over the nascent MP3 player market in just a few years. Those sales added wind to the sails of Apple’s already improving financial footing after the company’s near-death experience in the late ‘90s.