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Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

It never makes me popular with the Apple fanpeople deigners at work, but I've long maintained that the genius move of Apple wasn't the design of the iPod, but rather than they finally gave people what they were demanding: One place to get (almost) all their music at reasonable prices.

I'm not sure WHY that offends them - that what people wanted was known doesn't mean it was easy to achieve. Frankly, I have more respect when someone solves a known but hard problem than when they come across something that happens to be popular. Given that intelligent design doesn't mean it will be popular, I see one as requiring hard work and the other requiring luck.

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Well, the iPod came out in 2001, and was already a huge phenomenon when the iTunes Music Store launched in (I believe) 2005.

So you can't give all the credit for why the iPod succeeded to something that didn't exist for those crucial first 4 years.

It gave them the leverage to create the store. Remember "rip, mix, burn"?

Most people were skipping the rip part or digitizing old stuff. iTunes gave the music people their dream: go buy everything again.

2 years. The iTunes Store opened in 2003.

Initial models didn't even have USB or Windows support, remember. Incidentally, that came around the same time.

The iPod didn't sell all that well until 2004. It's no coincidence that was after Windows support and the iTunes Store.

Could be that it helped that Apple had a shoe in with media production.

I recall coming across musician magazines at a friends place, and it was all about Apple computers and how they could be used with midi and synthesizers.

Similarly a local newspaper, that was a heavy Windows user, had a old grayscale Mac hooked up to a SCSI scanner in their graphics office.

And in recent years the national broadcaster announced that they would be standardizing their production line on Apple hardware and software. And this was after Xserve was discontinued.

Apple was a household name for the labels, as such they were likely more comfortable to come to an agreement with Jobs than anyone else.

The Mac was good at creative tasks before the PC was, and despite the PC later catching up, that foothold largely remained.

This meant OS X (and later iOS) has a high-quality, low-latency audio API, for example, because it needed it for music creation.

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