T3 built this one especially for its own thirtieth birthday and called it the Biggest Product in T3's Lifetime. Editor in chief Mat Gallagher runs the yearly awards, and picking a single winner from three decades of gadgets was never going to be simple. Judges didn't just look at how many units something sold. They thought about what actually changed how people live day to day. And out of six finalists, the iPod pulled ahead by changing an entire industry rather than just one product category. Six other Headline Awards went out that same day, including a Person of the Year nod to outgoing Apple boss Tim Cook and a British Icon award for web pioneer Tim Berners Lee. It's a small, slightly odd thing, watching a device that once promised a thousand songs in your pocket beat a shiny smartphone for the top spot, and that detail is worth pausing on for a second.
Apple launched the iPod back in 2001 as a boxy white device that held about a thousand songs on a ten gigabyte drive. It ran through six generations of the classic design,plus spinoff lines like the Mini, the Nano, the Shuffle and the Touch. Apple finally pulled the plug on the last iPod in 2022, twenty one years after it first went on sale, and without it, several former Apple engineers have said, the iPhone almost certainly never gets built.
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