In 2001, Windows ruled personal computer OS, while Mac had less than 5% market share.

Music players like the Walkman and CD players were there for decades. The bulky size and slow navigation of existing music players – most importantly, 320 million CDs were sold in the US – triggered the company Apple to think about the product related to the music business. Initially, the storage size in a limited space was the constraint, but they found a hard drive with a storage capacity of up to 5GB on their visit to Toshiba, Japan.

Steve Jobs wanted to increase the Mac sales using their new music player product, which he envisioned with subtle details and had the following key features:
➡️ Portable: Size of a card deck.
➡️ Ability: Easy to navigate with a scroll wheel.
➡️ Better power management.
➡️ Capacity: Store 1000+ songs (5 GB)
➡️ Design with apologetically white.
➡️ Playlists only on iTunes.

But the sales results were underwhelming, as it was not reachable to the masses. Steve stuck to the vision of Apple’s own unified utopia, a closed, perfect ecosystem; the iPod required a Mac to function.

After many discussions and presentations on sales, he kept his vision aside and let them create iTunes software for Windows. This compatibility with Windows burst the demand. Also, users outside the Apple ecosystem could taste quality, and it created a positive halo effect on other Apple products, which were lacking market share, and the rest was history. The sudden burst in demand gave the manufacturer a headache to shift out of Taiwan.

The other digital music players, like Rio and Zune, came out but struggled to compete with the iPod’s simplicity and innovation.

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