The iPod is a discontinued series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices designed and marketed by Apple Inc.[2][3] The first version was released on October 23, 2001, about 8+1⁄2 months after the Macintosh version of iTunes was released. Apple sold an estimated 450 million iPod products as of 2022. Apple discontinued the iPod product line on May 10, 2022... At Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ direction, hardware engineering chief Jon Rubinstein recruited Tony Fadell, a former employee of General Magic and Philips, who had a business idea to invent a better MP3 player and build a complementary music sales store... Fadell found support for his project with Apple Computer and was hired by Apple in 2001 as an independent contractor to work on the iPod project, then code-named project P-68.[14] Because most of Apple's engineering manpower and resources were already dedicated to the iMac line, Fadell hired engineers from his startup company, Fuse, and veteran engineers from General Magic and Philips to build the core iPod development team.[11] Time constraints forced Fadell to develop various components of the iPod outside Apple.[11] Fadell partnered with a company called PortalPlayer to design software for the device; this work eventually took shape as the iPod OS... Apple contracted another company, Pixo,[14] to help design and implement the user interface (as well as Unicode, memory management, and event processing[14]) under Jobs' direct supervision... The iTunes Store (introduced April 29, 2003) is an online media store run by Apple and accessed through iTunes. The store became the market leader soon after its launch[70] and Apple announced the sale of videos through the store on October 12, 2005. Full-length movies became available on September 12, 2006.[71] At the time the store was introduced, purchased audio files used the AAC format with added encryption, based on the FairPlay DRM system. Up to five authorized computers and an unlimited number of iPods could play the files. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod

I used for a long time my 7th-gen iPod-shuffle - to (a) save phone battery, and (b) because sync/play/last.fm scrobbling works better.

• how to turn off shuffle mode
• update: I finally lost it, and that drove me finally to switch to less-convenient phone-downloads, played with VLC

2005-2010 notes

very popular MP3 Player is the Apple IPod, because of its huge capacity and excellent GUI.

Mark Frauenfelder on how to swap the battery yourself.

shall we call its users Pod People? They are, rather, walking about like zombies...

Cory Doctorow has covered Apple Computer's bad DRM directions...

There's a project to port LinuxOS to it. http://ipodlinux.org/Main_Page

• creative text input options (beside external Keyboard hack) http://ipodlinux.org/Text_Input_Methods

And Python! http://ciberjacobo.com/en/linux_on_ipod.html#python