A life-changing innovation?

"Five years ago this week the first iPods arrived in Australia on a reconnaissance mission for what was to become a mass invasion. They were bound for the desks of tech writers eager to get their hands on the new digital music players that had been revealed by their Apple makers in California six weeks earlier.

Although it was not the first MP3 player — that honour went to the Saehan-Eiger Labs MPMan in 1998 — the iPod in partnership with iTunes was the first to offer a vast library of legal downloads. It dominates the digital player industry, shifting more than 39 million units in the past financial year. While rivals including other MP3 players and 3G mobile phones are in furious pursuit of a growing market — albeit on the playing field that iPod helped create — pundits point out that no other product has so far managed to rival the iPod's emotional cachet.

The iPod has become embedded in popular culture in a way its predecessor, the Walkman, and its MP3 rivals never managed. It shuffled in an era of DIY-ism, undermining the traditional music industry model with consumer autonomy, but in the process sparking dark mutterings about a generation of iPod zombies with the tell-tale white wires snaking from their ears."

There can be little doubt that the ipod has created a minor revolution in a variety of ways. This piece in The Age analyses how life has changed in the 5 years since the ipod arrived.

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Reading the Chilcot Inquiry Report more closely

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Mahler's Prodigal Son

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