The original iPod is ten years old.  That first iPod is also the first Apple product that I purchased for myself.

Anyone who’s ever been in my home¹ knows that I’m a music lover.  I’ve got lots of CDs, DVDs, and vinyl.  I had been considering getting an MP3 player already, but nothing was compelling enough to make me want to buy it.  Then the iPod came along.  A friend got one, I played with it, and I instantly fell in love.

The problem was, I was a Linux user at the time, and the original iPod was Mac-only.  I already had a Windows partition for Quicken purposes, though, and so I figured out a workaround that let me move files to the iPod using Windows.  So I bought the iPod, and I loved it.  I was so excited to have 5 GB of my music in my pocket, and I loved the design of it.  It felt good in my hand, and it was easy to use.

The iPod is part of what convinced me to become a Mac user.  I was already aware that the then-new OS X was Unix under the hood.  I’d been toying with the idea of not having to recompile my kernel all the time.  With Jaguar resolving many of the issues in the original Cheetah and Puma releases, I took the plunge and bought a PowerBook.  I quickly found that I wasn’t using my old Linux box very much anymore because I always had the Terminal waiting for me whenever I felt like I needed vi or sed.  It was retired, and I haven’t looked back.