It’s only been 10 years since the iPod launched, and since it’s become the number one selling music device in the world, according to comments made by Tim Cook at Apple’s “Let’s Talk iPhone” event in Cupertino this morning. He mentioned that market share in the U.S. has been over 70 percent “for a very long time” (at 78 percent now), during the course of which 300 million iPods were sold around the world.

Cook gave a little perspective to the numbers by adding that it took Sony 30 years to sell less than 250,000 Walkman cassette players. Of the 300 million iPods sold since the product’s birth, 45 million of them were sold in the last year between July 2010 to June 2011. Cook said that almost half of those sold this year are going to iPod virgins.