Five years, five major generations… it’s time to pay our respects to what is, if not the most innovative, the most influential piece of consumer electronics in recent memory: The Apple iPod. Today’s iPods bear only a passing resemblance to the original, both in the controls and under the hood: The state of the art 5G iPod holds 80GB of data, or about 16,000 songs. The click-wheel has been honed and refined year after year to the point where it’s hard to believe the 1G, 2G, and 3G iPods actually had buttons. Today’s iPods play video in full color and are smaller and slimmer than ever.