The iPod arrived in October 2001 with a modest goal: to create a music product that made people want to buy more Macintosh computers.

In the years that followed, it exploded in popularity, changing consumer electronics and the music industry. Throughout much of the 2000s, people wandered the world, headphones dangling from their ears. The iPod was ubiquitous.

On Tuesday, Apple officially said goodbye to all that. The company announced it had phased out production of its iPod Touch, bringing an end to a two-decade run of a product line that inspired the creation of the iPhone and helped turn Silicon Valley into the epicenter of global capitalism.

Apple assured customers that the music will live on, largely through the iPhone, which it introduced in 2007, and Apple Music, a seven-year-old service that testifies to customers' modern preferences. The days of buying and owning 99-cent songs on an iPod largely gave way to monthly subscription offerings that provide access to broader catalogs of music.

The iPod provided a blueprint for Apple for decades by packaging unrivaled industrial design, hardware engineering, software development and services. It also demonstrated how the company was seldom first to market with a new product but often triumphed.

In the late 1990s, the first digital music players were beginning to appear. The earliest versions could hold a couple of dozen songs, allowing people who were in the early days of copying CDs onto their computers to transfer those songs into their pockets.

Steve Jobs viewed the emerging category as an opportunity for giving Apple's legacy computer business modern appeal. A die-hard music fan, who ranked the Beatles and Bob Dylan among his favorite artists, Jobs thought tapping into people's love of music would help persuade them to switch to Macintoshes from Microsoft-powered personal computers, which had a more than 90% market share.

"You didn't have to do any market research," said Jon Rubinstein, who led Apple's engineering at the time. "Everyone loved music."

The first-generation iPod's $399 price tag blunted demand, limiting the company to sales of fewer than 400,000 units in the first year. Three years later, Apple released the iPod Mini, which cost $249 and held 1,000 songs. By the end of its fiscal year in September 2005, it had sold 22.5 million iPods.

"It took off like a rocket," Rubinstein said.