October 26, 2004: Apple debuts the iPod Photograph, a tool able to placing not simply 15,000 songs in your pocket, but in addition 25,000 images. The brand new system “helps you to take your complete music and photograph library with you wherever you go,” Apple says.
It’s the first iPod to supply a coloration display screen and the power to show digital pictures and album cowl artwork. The iPod Photograph represents an enormous step ahead within the performance of Apple’s iconic music participant.
iPod Photograph: The height of the iPod’s success
A fourth-generation iPod, the iPod Photograph entered the product line on the top of the Apple music participant’s cultural affect. (Learn extra about that in our iPod retrospective, “An illustrated historical past of the iPod and its large affect.”)
The iPod Photograph launched on today in 2004 introduced progressive new options along with its 2-inch, 65,536-color LCD display screen with LED backlight.
“iPod Photograph holds as much as 25,000 digital pictures alongside your music library and shows them on its beautiful high-resolution coloration display screen, permitting you to scroll via your photograph library nearly immediately utilizing iPod’s patent pending Click on Wheel,” Apple mentioned in a press launch saying the system. “iPod Photograph helps you to mix your music and your favourite pictures to create magical slideshows in your iPod, and options TV-out for sharing your slideshows on large display screen televisions and projectors.”
Enhancements included elevated playtime and the power to ship pictures to a tv through composite- or S-video cables. Past the display screen and different updates, it retained the identical Click on Wheel controller as different iPods, together with then-standard FireWire and USB 2.0 connections.
It got here in two configurations: a 40GB mannequin that retailed for $500 and a 60GB model that price $600. This made the brand new system a comparatively pricy (though tempting) proposition.
Apple’s up to date music participant is all about that colourful display screen
In fact, that candy coloration display screen was the iPod Photograph’s large promoting level. It made an enormous distinction when in comparison with earlier iPods’ drab, monochrome shows.
Menus seemed cleaner and the built-in Solitaire recreation lastly proved playable. Even higher, artist names or music and album titles that didn’t match on the display screen now not acquired reduce brief with an ellipsis. Now, they scrolled throughout the display screen. It was like residing sooner or later!
Trying again from as we speak’s vantage level, it’s apparent that units just like the iPod Photograph weren’t merely makes an attempt to lengthen the lifespan of a product getting lengthy within the tooth by slapping on just a few low-cost (or not-so-cheap) gimmicks. As a substitute, the power to hold a high-end coloration show in your pocket, and to have the ability to use this to view pictures, was a part of the build-up to the iPhone, which Apple unveiled three years later in 2007. In that method, the iPod Photograph helped pave the best way for Apple’s arrival as a real “cellular first” firm.
The iPod line continued lengthy after the iPhone’s launch, nonetheless. Apple lastly pulled the plug on the iPod contact in Might 2022.
Did you personal the iPod Photograph? Depart your feedback beneath.