Why won’t our tech talk?
In 2001, if you listened to digital music, you did it with a large folder of MP3 files. How you acquired them is probably best left between you and a priest, but you may have ripped them from a CD, downloaded them from a file-sharing service, or bought them from one of a few nascent download sites.
Whichever option you picked, you’d play them on your computer with a program built for the task. And if you were lucky enough to have an early standalone MP3 player, it was probably made by yet another company.
Whether or not MP3s interested you, you probably bought music on CD, and had a couple of players in the house – maybe a portable and a hi-fi. Your headphones, of course, connected to whatever you used, be that a simple Discman or a fancy Nomad Jukebox, with a normal 3.5mm plug.
Today, for millions of people, all those companies have been replaced by one: Apple. You
