Today marks the 25th anniversary of the original iPod, first announced on Oct. 23, 2001. Apple Music is celebrating the milestone with an elaborate easter egg that lets you play with an in-depth virtual version of its iconic gadget.
This iPod appears when you hit a broken page on Apple Music’s website, as spotted by TechRadar, with the wording “Page Not Found” followed by “Give this a spin instead.” The virtual iPod looks like the original device from 2001, letting you navigate around with its click wheel, along with buttons for Menu, Back, and Forward, as well as Select and Pause/Play.
The software looks like the original iPod interface, with the home menu offering Playlists, Artists, Songs, and Settings. All of these features are fully interactive, and it comes with 1,029 songs on board for you to play, although you’re limited to minute-and-a-half-long clips. The software suggests the virtual iPod is the equivelant of 4.5GB full.
The tracks are picked to be nostalgia hits, focusing on eras when iPod use was at its peak. There are tracks from after 2001, but most of the picks included are meant to remind you of what you may have uploaded to your own iPod in the noughties and early 2010s.
(Credit: Apple)
Some examples include Alien Ant Farm, Bloc Party, Evanescence, Justice, The Knife, Mariah Carey, Nickelback, Phoenix, Regina Spektor, Ricky Martin, Shaggy, The Shins, Slipknot, Sum 41, The Ting Tings, and Wyclef Jean. Most artists feature between one and five tracks, all playable in your web browser as these short clips.
Apple has also built playlists, including one called Songs From iPod, featuring 22 iconic tracks from the MP3 player’s lifetime, such as “Feel Good Inc.” by Gorillaz, “Technologic” by Daft Punk, and “Vertigo” by U2. There are also playlists dedicated to 2001 across alternative, country, pop, rock, and hip-hop genres.
Other original iPod features here: you can scrub through each song using the click wheel, turn on Shuffle or Repeat, turn the backlight on and off, and mute the click wheel noise. Apple has made this an exhaustive tool, though it’s unclear whether it intends to keep it after it finishes its iPod anniversary celebrations.
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Another possible easter egg built into the website is that one song was uploaded twice under the same artist. For Coldplay, the song “Viva La Vida” is listed twice, which was a common issue with the iPod and other MP3 players when syncing to your computer’s library.
If an artist’s name was formatted differently, or you had two files on your computer, it sometimes caused songs to be uploaded to your iPod multiple times. It’s unclear whether this Coldplay situation is an error in Apple’s new easter egg, or an intentional way to give you an authentic noughties experience.
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