GQ:

It’s no great secret that how one carried one’s portable music payer back then – as one does still to this day – was to plug in, press play and then stuff your player (and 1,000 songs) into your pocket, just as the advert instructed. This meant, of course, that no matter how different the iPod looked, no matter how new the interface, no one would notice or see it as it would be buried in a coat pocket along with your monthly rail cards, lighters and lint. What Apple needed was a way of signalling to everyone else in the train carriage, bus or on the sidewalk, that it was an iPod in the customer’s pocket, rather than some other music player.

Yet, as is so often with products, it was the marketing – the adverts – that would really catapult the iPod into the stratosphere and feed the customers’ imagination and desire for The New. The “silhouette campaign” ads, which I’m sure many of you remember more than the early hardware, focused on the white earbuds that came with each iPod – a design feature that Ive has since stated was pure serendipity. (The white earbuds were white, he commented, because the iPod itself was white; it was consistency, more than anything else.)

I’ve always hated Apple’s earbuds – they never fit properly for me and were uncomfortable even after short periods of time – but I love how they were/are signifiers of “certain people”.