In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the iPod introduction, posted below is my first quick review of the original iPod I wrote back in November 2001. Click the image above to check out a Flickr set I created showing the unboxing of my first iPod.

Introducing iPod – November 11, 2001

Just bought an iPod today at my local Authorized Apple Reseller. They received their shipment in last night, but they couldn’t sell them until today. Very odd since alot of people who ordered their iPods directly from Apple started to receive them earlier this week.

The iPod is packaged in a VERY cool 6″ square cube box. Lifting off the outer shell revealed two rectangular boxes attached to each other that open like a book. The attention to detail in the packaging is amazing. The iPod is in the right hand side with the ear buds underneath and the documentation, AC adapter and Firewire cable are in the left.

The iPod is much smaller than I had originally imagined. I did notice the “Don’t Steal Music” on the clear wrapping of the iPod. A very nice feature is the 6 foot Firewire cable. My PowerMac G4 is on the floor under my desk so I’m pleased Apple didn’t skimp on cable length.

I plugged in the Firewire cable to the iPod then into the G4 and sure enough, iTunes 2 launched, asked me what I would like to call my iPod and then commenced to download all my music to the iPod. I only had 90 songs so far in iTunes and it didn’t take more then 2 minutes to download all of them. I unplugged the iPod and started to play with the controls.

The controls are so smooth and easy to use. The jog dial is absolute genius. The ear buds sound surprisingly well! They even have a great bass sound which I thought was impossible with ear buds. Unfortunately, I can’t stand ear buds for more then 5 minutes so I will go out and look for some nice high quality portable head phones.

FINALLY Apple has a product that many Windows users are lusting after, but can’t use. Us Mac users have suffered when cool and new software or hardware comes out and its Windows only or Windows now and Mac later. Now I doubt very much that a cool MP3 player like this will drive people to actually buy a Mac, but it doesn’t hurt. Like Steve Jobs said in his introduction of the iPod, this is the first of a new line of digital devices that Apple is creating. If Apple continues to come out with simple, elegant, easy to use devices like the iPod (I pray for an Apple PDA) I’m quite sure that will start to bring more and more people over to the Mac platform. Only time will tell.

One of the big stinks that many reviewers brought up about the iPod is its price. Well, Mac news sites are reporting that many Apple Stores, Apple resellers and Comp USA’s sold out of thier iPods yesterday. Each Apple Store alone received 200 iPods per store. People know quality when they see it. Like my Dad always says, you get what you pay for. You could pay $100 for a cheap ass MP3 player that only holds 30 songs at a time and has a very slow USB connection or you could pay $400 for an iPod which holds 1,500 songs, comes with a superfast Firewire connection and also doubles as an external hard drive.

Well thats about it. My iPod is now charging with the cool AC adapter with a Firewire port on it and I will be spending the rest of the day ripping the rest of my CD’s.

Over the past few days since the announcement of Steve Jobs’ death, I’ve been thinking about what I should write. After reading hundreds of blog posts, news articles, tweets, Google + and Facebook posts, I really didn’t know what more I could add. So I decided to write about a topic very specific to how Steve Jobs influenced my life: Sleep.

Or, more specifically, lack thereof.

I wouldn’t necessarily call myself an Apple fanboy, but I do enjoy the Apple products I own very much and I tend to get a bit overexcited when new products are about to be announced. So what does this have to do with sleepless nights? May I introduce the adult geeks replacement for Christmas morning: The Apple Event.

About fives times a year, Apple fans and the tech industry as a whole are treated to an Apple event. These used to take place only a couple of times a year during MacWorld Expo’s in January and June. But now that those conferences have all but dried up (and Apple is large enough to attract it’s own audience) we now have Apple events. We Apple fans have been treated to some brilliant product launches by Steve Jobs and company since his return in 1997. The iMac, the iBook (and it’s surprise wifi), the G4 Cube, the iPod, Mac OS X, Intel processors, the iPhone, the MacBook Air, the iPad, I could go on and on. For months beforehand, each one of these events is meticulously created and then rehearsed over and over again until Steve thought it was perfect.

No other tech company has as much news coverage BEFORE an event than Apple, never mind afterward. For weeks in advance of an event, you can cut the anticipation with a knife. Which brings me back to where I started: sleepless nights.

I believe the prime years of Steve Jobs’ keynotes were from 1998 with the introduction of the iMac through 2007 with the introduction of the iPhone. During these 9 years, I would not get a wink of sleep the night before an Apple event. And during the years that Apple would webcast the events, I would literally take the day off from work to experience the event live. One of my top three favorite events would have to be the iPhone launch and how Steve slowly brought the audience up to climax with the tease of “three revolutionary devices” only to reveal it was only one actual device: The iPhone. Not to mention the mind-blowing iPhone user interface demos that came over the next 45 minutes. It was an amazing and exhausting keynote and I loved every minute of it (and still do).

I don’t like the idea of a world where Apple events will not be hosted by Steve Jobs. Sure, we’ve seen a few of them over the past few years when Steve’s ill health has prevented it and others like Tim Cook and Phil Schiller have stepped in to help. But Steve was still running the company and I’m sure had a large influence on the event even though he wasn’t there. Unfortunately, that time has passed.

I will forever miss the Christmas morning anticipation of Apple events hosted by Steve Jobs. I would give up a weeks worth of sleep just to see one more.

Thank you, Steve. Rest well.

With the HP TouchPad getting ho-hum reviews before it’s launch tomorrow, it’s interesting to see the comparisons between the TouchPad (or really any tablet that has been launched this year) and the iPad 2. What I find interesting is, hardly anyone is comparing these new tablets to an original iPad.

The original iPad is still a pretty fast and highly usable device and it will run iOS 5 perfectly fine this fall. Never mind the fact that Apple still sells them (although refurbished, but still with full warranty) starting at $349 (!) for the 16GB wi-fi iPad. From the reviews I’ve been reading about the latest Android 3.0, RIM or HP devices, with the exception of an external camera, why would anyone NOT buy an original iPad for only $349?

In my opinion, for the most part, it’s still better than what the competition is releasing over a year later.