I never owned an iPod Mini. Even as a college freshman back at the time of its introduction, I was already more of a full-size iPod kind of nerd. Mine was the third-gen model with the backlit buttons, which I maintain was the best version ever released. I wanted the most storage possible for the flourishing music collection that I’d amassed through years of painfully slow downloads over Napster, LimeWire, and Usenet groups. (There were some legal iTunes purchases mixed in there, I promise.)
But by 2004, the iPod had a starting price of $299 and could run as high as $399. Apple needed to offer a music player that many more people could afford. And that came in 2004, the year of the first-ever iPod Mini.
Onstage at Macworld, Steve Jobs…