Apple has marked a quarter century of the iPod in the most Apple way possible: quietly, and without selling anyone anything new. A fully interactive recreation of the original iPod is now hidden inside the Apple Music website, timed to the 25th anniversary of Steve Jobs unveiling the device on 23 October 2001.
Finding it takes a little curiosity. Rather than sitting on a dedicated page, the virtual iPod appears when you visit an Apple Music web address that doesn’t exist. Type any made-up path after music.apple.com and, instead of a plain error page, you’re greeted with a nudge to play with a digital iPod. It’s a clever reuse of a page most people only see by accident.
The recreation leans heavily on the first-generation design: the white face, the small monochrome screen and the mechanical scroll wheel that defined the original model before Apple moved to touch-sensitive and click wheels. You can scroll through menus and pick from a playlist of early-2000s-flavoured tracks from artists such as Coldplay, Britney Spears, Daft Punk, Eminem and Alicia Keys. Don’t expect a full listening session, though, since songs only play as short previews.
There’s also an Easter egg within the Easter egg. The Breakout-style Brick game that was hidden in early iPods makes a return, accessible by heading into Settings, opening About and holding down the centre button for a few seconds. It’s a detail clearly aimed at people who remember discovering it the first time.
The nostalgia lands because the iPod’s impact is hard to overstate. MP3 players already existed in 2001, but Apple’s combination of compact hardware, simple navigation and tight iTunes integration pushed portable digital music into the mainstream and laid groundwork for the iTunes Store and, eventually, the iPhone. That success ultimately cannibalised the iPod itself, and Apple discontinued the last model, the iPod touch, in 2022.
Which is why the anniversary also highlights what’s missing. A modern, distraction-free music player with streaming support has been a recurring wish among Apple fans, especially as phones become ever more crowded with notifications and apps. Apple has given no sign it intends to revisit dedicated music hardware, and a browser toy is a far cry from a new product.
For now, the iPod lives on mainly through old units kept alive by enthusiasts and the modding community. Apple seems happy to celebrate the legacy, but whether it sees any future for a standalone music device remains an open question it has no apparent interest in answering.
