It started with the simple ambition of revolutionising music(!), but in the past 10 years Mr Jobs’s pocket player has achieved much more, says Andrew Everard

The driving force behind Apple, Steve Jobs, died at the beginning of October 2011, the day after the launch of a new iPhone, and just a couple of weeks before what is arguably his single biggest contribution to consumer electronics – the iPod – hit its 10th anniversary.

True, the iPod was far from unique when it was announced on October 23, 2001 – in fact, there had been MP3 players on the market since 1998, when Eiger Labs’ MPMan F10 hit the shops.

What's more, at launch it wasn’t exactly cheap: the original white  iPod, which set the style for what eventually became the ‘Classic’ line, would have cost you $399 against the $250 of the MPMan.

But what the iPod had on its side – along with the soon-to-be-iconic styling and 2001: A Space Odyssey-derived catchy name – was storage capacity: the original model had 5GB, whereas those early MP3 players had arrived on the market 32MB.

Storage was expensive in those days, but whereas the MP3 machines could store just 32 minutes of audio, Jobs was able to claim at the launch of the iPod that it could put ‘1000 songs in your pocket’.

Yes, songs: then, as now, in iWorld a track was a song, be it a pop hit or one movement of a Mahler symphony.

More to the point, an original iPod could store around 100 hours of music, or to put it another way, 100 CDs. These days, iPods go up to 160GB, and can store 40,000 songs, or even 200 hours of video.

For Jobs, speaking at the time of the launch, there was another audio icon in the firing line: ‘This is the 21st-century Walkman,’ he said, in a Fortune article headlined, somewhat prophetically ‘CEO Steve Jobs thinks he has something pretty nifty. And if he’s right, he might even spook Sony and Matsushita’.

Spooked they were: the iPod has seen off not only Sony’s cassette Walkman players but also the MiniDisc machines designed to replace them, while Matsushita (now Panasonic) long ago abandoned the personal audio game, having never quite recovered from the lacklustre performance of the Digital Compact Cassette format..

Over a quarter of a billion iPods have now been sold, the line-up now accounting for well over three-quarters of the personal audio market. Then there are the huge numbers of iPhones and iPads the original design begat, and the iTunes music service’s over 10 billion music downloads, along with massive numbers of films, TV shows and the like.

I think it can be said that the iPod has more than fulfilled its original promise.

Record companies have come to take the iPod and iTunes seriously, not as a threat to their traditional business but as an important means of distributing releases, and now there’s only one set of hearts and minds to win over – the ‘serious’ audio industry.

Not so long ago I read a piece from a group of hi-fi retailers suggesting that music stored on an iPod was ‘pre-ruined’, and that the role of the hi-fi retailer was to show users the error of their ways and convert them back to real high-end audio equipment.

A more enlightened approach I heard came at a seminar held by a company founded on affordable turntables, but now with a fast-growing range of hi-fi separates: the founder of Pro-ject, Heinz Lichtenegger, has been exhorting dealers to park their sneers when a customer comes in with an iPod, and instead demonstrate just how good the little Apple device can sound when connected through a good audio system.

The iPod dock has been with us for many years, but now there are increasing numbers of hi-fi systems and separates, some at prices way beyond the mass-market, able to take a digital signal from an iPod and make it sound very good indeed.

And of course, just because you can put 40,000 songs on an iPod in compressed form, that doesn’t mean you have to: try loading one up with some works ripped at full CD resolution – you’ll still get over 25 hours of music on a 16GB iPod – then connect it up to one of these digitally-connected systems, sit back and listen.

Do, that, and you may just look at your iPod in a whole new light…