What is an iPod?

An iPod is a portable device for storing and playing audio files encoded by MP3 or AAC compression algorithms. Designed by Apple Computer, iPods have distinctive styling and can hold anywhere from a few hundred to ten thousand songs.

Released in 2001, the original iPod came with a body of white Lucite and chrome. Two years later Apple released the iPod Mini, approximately one-third the size of the original iPod and encased in a variety of shiny metallic colors. The smallest member of the iPod family, the Shuffle, reduced the size down to that of a package of stick gum and looked very much like the original. All iPods came with distinctive white headphones.

The larger iPod and the iPod Mini use an extremely small hard disk for storage. The Shuffle uses a type of memory known as flash; unlike the memory found in computers, flash memory does not lose its contents when the power is turned off. As the prices and capacities of both hard disks and flash memory continue to fall, the storage capacity of all three models has increased over time.