DOTD For Thursday, October 23, 2025

A Mocktail For The Device That Changed The World

Today’s DOTD - Drink Of The Day - is an Apple Pie a la Mode Mocktail inspired by the debut of the iPod on this day in 2001.

Portable music has been around for ages - after all, we carry our voices with us. But the drive for portable audio players started in 1979 with Sony’s Walkman. Over time, the portable cassette player gave way to the potable CD player, and then went digital with the invention of the first commercially successful portable MP3 player in 1999, Diamond Multimedia’s Rio.

However, it was Apple’s iPod, unveiled by Steve Jobs on this day in 2001, that truly changed how we listen to everything, not just how & where we enjoy music, but also changed the music industry, and indeed the entire audio industry. After all, without the iPod, we wouldn’t even have podcasts.

The first iPod, which was developed in less than a year, had a 5 GB hard drive capable of putting “1,000 songs in your pocket”. For those of us previously constricted by the capacity of a C-90 cassette, this was an unbelievable number of songs, and coupled with its clever wheel-based user interface, made the amazing new iPod seem space-age.

Indeed, the name iPod was proposed by a freelance copywriter named Vinnie Chieco after he saw a prototype and was reminded of the white EVA pods of the Discovery One spaceship in the sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Chieco drew an analogy between the relationship of the small independent pods in the movie to the large spaceship that carried them, and the relationship of the new portable MP3 player and the personal computer that was then-necessary to load music tracks onto it.

In 2022, Apple finally ceased production of standalone iPods as the iPhone & other smartphones killed the iPod, in a similar way to how the iPod had rendered Sony’s Walkman cassette players obsolete 20 years earlier.

Today, we’re celebrating the vision of Apple’s Steve Jobs and his brilliant engineers and designers, who gave us all the iPod with our Drink Of The Day: an Apple Pie a la Mode.

Ingredients

Here’s what you’re going to need for this drink: