Apple iPod Classic 1st Gen

iPod Classic 1st Gen

Product Brand: Apple

Editor's Rating:
2.5

Pros

• Revolutionary for its time with its 5 GB storage capacity.
• Classic design with a click wheel interface.
• Supports multiple audio file formats, including MP3 and AAC.
• Great battery life for its time.
• Can be used as an external hard drive.

Cons

• Limited storage capacity compared to newer devices.
• No colour display or video playback capabilities.
• No built-in FM radio or Wi-Fi connectivity.
• Limited compatibility with newer versions of iTunes and macOS.
• Heavy and bulky compared to newer devices.

Apple iPod Classic 1st Gen Review and Features

Apple iPod with scroll wheel also known as Apple iPod 1st Generation, 2001.

Apple introduced the first-generation iPod (M8541) on October 23, 2001, with the slogan “1,000 songs in your pocket”. They went on sale on November 10, 2001. The first iPod had a monochrome LCD (liquid-crystal display) screen and featured a 5 GB hard drive capable of storing 1,000 songs encoded using MP3 and was priced at US$399.

Among the iPod’s innovations was its small size, achieved using a 1.8″ hard drive, whereas other HDD-based competitors (like earlier DEC Personal Jukebox player) were using 2.5″ hard drives at the time, and its easy-to-use navigation, which was controlled using a mechanical scroll wheel (unlike later iPods, which had touch-sensitive scroll wheels), a centre select button, and four auxiliary buttons around the wheel. The iPod had a rated battery life of ten hours.

On March 20, 2002, Apple introduced a 10 GB model of the first-generation iPod for US$499. VCard compatibility was added, allowing iPods to display business card information synced from a Mac.

The iPod Classic (stylized and marketed as iPod classic and formerly iPod Video or just iPod) is a discontinued portable media player created and formerly marketed by Apple Inc.

There were six generations of the iPod Classic and a spin-off (the iPod Photo) that was later re-integrated into the main iPod line. All generations used a 1.8-inch (46 mm) hard drive for storage. The “classic” suffix was formally introduced with the rollout of the sixth-generation iPod on September 5, 2007.

Before this, all iPod Classic models were simply referred to as iPods; the first iPod released in 2001 was part of this line called “Classic”. It was available in silver or black from 2007 onwards, replacing the “signature iPod white”.

On September 9, 2014, Apple discontinued the iPod Classic. The sixth-generation 160 GB iPod Classic was the last Apple product to use the original 30-pin dock connector and the distinctive click wheel.

The iPod’s operating system is stored on its dedicated storage medium. An additional NOR flash ROM chip (either 1 MB or 512 KB) contains a bootloader program that tells the device to load its OS from the storage medium.

Each iPod has 32 MB of RAM, although the 60 GB and 80 GB fifth generation and the sixth-generation models have 64 MB. A portion of the RAM is used to hold the iPod OS loaded from firmware, but most of it serves to cache songs from the storage medium.

For example, an iPod could spin its hard disk up once and copy approximately 30 MB of upcoming songs into RAM, thus saving power by not requiring the drive to spin up for each song.

Custom firmware has also been developed, such as Rockbox (up to 1G – 6G requires emCORE) and iPodLinux (up to 5G, 6G has an encrypted firmware.), which offer open-source alternatives to the standard firmware and operating system.

iPods with colour displays use anti-aliased graphics and text with sliding animations. All iPods have five buttons, and the later generations (4th and above) have the buttons integrated into the click wheel. This design gives an uncluttered, minimalist interface, though the circuitry contains multiple momentary button switches. The buttons are:

• Menu: to traverse back through the menus, toggle the backlight on older iPods, and jump to the main menu on newer iPods
• Center: to select a menu item
• Play / Pause: this doubles as an off-switch when held
• Skip Forward / Fast Forward
• Skip Backwards / Fast Reverse

Full Technical Specifications