iPod History - Wikipedia

The iPod came from Apple's digital hub strategy, as the company began creating software for the growing market of digital devices purchased by consumers. While digital cameras, camcorders and organizers had well-established mainstream markets, the company found digital music players lacking in user interface and decided to develop its own.

Hardware design of the 3^rd generation iPod.

Tony Fadell, a former Philips executive in the company's Windows CE division, left Philips to create a hard drive based MP3 player and a music service ^[1]. He founded a company, Fuse, to develop and sell the idea to major media companies. After RealNetworks turned him down, Apple accepted and they began developing the iPod in February 2001, one month after iTunes was released. It was announced to the public on 23 October 2001 as a Mac-compatible product with a 5 GB hard drive that put "1000 songs in your pocket."

Uncharacteristically, Apple decided not to develop the iPod's software in-house. Instead, Apple used a Design Chain and contracted with PortalPlayer, who already had a reference design (based on 2 ARM cores) with rudimentary software running on top of a commercial microkernel embedded operating system. PortalPlayer had been working on an IBM-branded MP3 player with Bluetooth headphones.^[1] Apple contracted another company, Pixo, to create and refine the user interface, under the direct supervision of CEO Steve Jobs.

Once established, Apple continued to refine the look-and-feel. Starting with the iPod mini, the Chicago font (once used on early Macintosh computers) was replaced with Espy Sans, which was originally used in eWorld and Copland. The most recent iPods have switched fonts again to Myriad – Apple's new corporate font. The iPods with color displays adopted some Mac OS X themes like Aqua progress bars and brushed metal in the FM tuner and lock interfaces.