In December 2002, Apple unveiled its first limited edition iPods, with either Madonna's, Tony Hawk's, or Beck's signature or No Doubt's band logo engraved on the back for an extra US$50.
At that time iTunes was Mac only and unavailable for Windows. These versions came with a 4-pin to 6-pin FireWire adapter and were bundled with Musicmatch Jukebox. Notably, the second-generation iPods and the updated first-generation iPod were now Windows-compatible. The first-generation 5GB iPod was carried over, but its price was reduced to US$299. The second-generation class was available in 10GB for US$399 and 20GB for US$499. Furthermore, the hold switch was redesigned, a cover was added to the FireWire port, and the mechanical wheel was replaced with a touch-sensitive wheel. Using a similar body style as the first generation, the top of the iPod was redesigned, switching from a single swooping cutout in the backplate to mount the FireWire port, hold switch and headphone assembly, to individual ports being cut into the backplate to allow these ports to be accessed. The second-generation of the iPod was introduced on July 17, 2002. VCard compatibility was added, as well as allowing iPods to display business card information synced from a Mac. On March 20, 2002, Apple introduced a 10GB model of the first-generation iPod for US$499.
The iPod had a rated battery life of ten hours. Among the iPod's innovations were 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 center select button, and four auxiliary buttons around the wheel. The first iPod had a monochrome LCD (liquid-crystal display) screen and featured a 5GB hard drive capable of storing 1,000 songs encoded using MP3 and was priced at US$399. History 1st generation Īpple introduced the first-generation iPod (M8541) on October 23, 2001, with the slogan "1,000 songs in your pocket". However, as of September 30, 2011, these games are no longer available on the iTunes Store.
A firmware update released in September 2006 brought some extra features to fifth-generation iPods including adjustable screen brightness, gapless playback, and downloadable games. Some built-in games are available, including Brick (a clone of Breakout), Parachute, Solitaire, and iPod Quiz. In March 2002, Apple added limited PDA-like functionality: text files can be displayed, while contacts and schedules can be viewed and synchronized with the host computer. Custom firmware has also been developed such as Rockbox (up to 6G - 6G requires emCORE) and iPodLinux (up to 5G) which offer open-source alternatives to the standard firmware and operating system. 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. A portion of the RAM is used to hold the iPod OS loaded from firmware, but the majority of it serves to cache songs from the storage medium. Each iPod also has 32 MB of RAM, although the 60GB and 80GB fifth generation, and the sixth-generation models have 64 MB. 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. The iPod's operating system is stored on its dedicated storage medium.
IPods with color displays use anti-aliased graphics and text, with sliding animations.