Technology · 2
On the original iPod released in 2001, since the scroll wheel itself couldn't be pressed, how did users actually pick a highlighted song?
Answer
By pressing a separate physical button next to the wheel
The first-generation iPod's mechanical scroll wheel only rotated to scroll through menus; a discrete 'Select' button had to be pressed separately, which made navigation slower than some rival players' one-touch controls.
💡 Did you know?
The original iPod's scroll wheel wasn't clickable—users had to press a separate button to select songs, making navigation slower than competitors' devices.
Other options people guess
- By double-tapping the wheel with two fingers
- By holding the wheel down for two seconds
- By using a small stylus included in the box
Topics
- ipod
- 2000s
- apple
- nostalgia
- gadgets
Know your technology trivia?
Play a free Technology quiz and see how many you get right — no signup needed to start.
More Technology facts
Technology
Apple marketed the screenless 2005 iPod Shuffle as being roughly the size of which everyday item?
The 2004 iPod Shuffle deliberately omitted a screen entirely, making it the first major music player sold blind—users couldn't see what they were playing.
Technology
When Apple's original iPod debuted in October 2001, which operating system was it built to work with exclusively?
Apple's first iPod required a Mac to function and couldn't work with Windows PCs, limiting its market to just 2% of computer users at launch.
Technology
The original iPod, released in 2001, required which connector—standard on Macs but rare on Windows PCs at the time—to sync music from a computer?
Fire Wire was required to sync the original iPod, not USB. This obscure connector was the main reason early adopters faced steep hardware costs.
Technology
What search engine, launched in 1994 as a human-curated web directory, was one of the first places people turned to find websites in the early years of the public World Wide Web?
Yahoo! originally stood for 'Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle' — a tongue-in-cheek acronym its Stanford student founders invented after the fact to fit a name they already loved.
Technology
What was the first graphical instant messaging client for the public internet, released by Mirabilis in 1996, that introduced features like contact lists and online-status indicators?
ICQ's distinctive 'uh-oh' notification sound became so recognizable in the late 1990s that many users still describe it as one of the most nostalgia-triggering sounds of the internet era.
Technology
By 1996, Lycos had catalogued roughly what percentage of the World Wide Web's pages, earning it a reputation as one of the web's most comprehensive early crawlers?
Lycos, once a top-five search engine, declined so rapidly that by 2004 it was bought for $95 million—a fraction of its peak value just five years earlier.