Biography | Steve Jobs — He Took a Thousand Songs Out of His Pocket in This Hall

The invitation that went out that week carried one line under the date: Hint: It's not a Mac.

On 23 October 2001 Steve Jobs walked into Town Hall, the 300-seat auditorium inside Building 4 on Apple's Infinite Loop campus, and pulled a white slab the size of a deck of cards from his jeans.

The device was called iPod.

It held a five-gigabyte hard drive, weighed 6.5 ounces, and was priced at $399.

Apple's press release that morning said it stored up to 1,000 CD-quality songs and could copy a compact disc over FireWire in under ten seconds.

A lithium-polymer battery was rated for ten hours.

Shipment was set for 10 November, Mac-only at launch, from the Apple Store and authorised resellers.

Town Hall had been built in 1993 as an internal briefing room, not a broadcast stage.

Jobs had used it for press events since he returned to Apple in 1997 because it sat a few hundred metres from the offices and held a room of reporters without hiring Moscone.

The first-generation player was not the first hard-drive music walker on the market.

What changed in this room was the argument that a computer company could sell a pocket object whose only job was to carry a library.

Ten years later, almost to the week, Tim Cook would open his first event as chief executive on the same stage and remind the room that the original iPod had been launched here.

The campus at 1 Infinite Loop is still Apple's.

Town Hall itself is no longer the room where the company launches phones.

That work moved in 2017 to a 1,000-seat theatre across Cupertino at Apple Park.

A visitor standing at the Infinite Loop sign sees six office buildings and the company store, not an auditorium door.

The hall is inside IL4, on the private loop, and it is not a public museum.

Cover: Building 4 at Infinite Loop, the building that contains Town Hall.

The second photograph is a first-generation iPod.

Photos: Yusuke Kawasaki, CC BY 2.0; original uploader Rjcflyer, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.