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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the infamous slashdot post about the iPod right after it was first announced:

> . No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

People harp on that line, but in retrospect it was spot on. First generation iPods were slow sellers and little more than a novelty/fashion accessory.

Remember that when it came out the killer feature (iTunes Music Store) was still 2 years and two hardware revisions away. What you had was a very expensive player that tethered you to a Mac if you wanted to load music.

That said, it had a significantly better user experience than contemporary competitors, but that's mostly because MP3 players back in 2001 were universally horrible. People sold devices with 8 Megabytes of storage for the music, and horrible DRM laden monstrosities for managing the music (see: Sony) that made them just miserable.

The iPod had basically 2 big wins: It had enough capacity to store a reasonable amount of music and a well designed interface. Certainly nice, but not enough to make your average person shell out the $400 Apple demanded for one.

The iPod wasn't a huge hit until the price came down and the iTunes Music Store gave people an easy way to get music for it.

"That said, it had a significantly better user experience than contemporary competitors, but that's mostly because MP3 players back in 2001 were universally horrible."

I love how people forget devices like Creative NOMAD, Archos Jukebox, etc. when recalling the past of Apple changing everything in personal media players. It is the same with ignoring the LG Prada when talking about the iPhone. Just stop it.

As a Mac user since 2001, what originally sold me on the 1st/2nd gen iPod was it had the capacity of the larger players without being the size of a game gear.

They definitely weren't the first and they really didn't catch on until they marketed the crap out of it and introduced the 3rd gen with USB connectors. The firewire 1st/2nd gen wouldn't even work on a lot of windows machines because they usually had 4 pin firewire or didn't supply enough power.

Funny thing is, the 1st/2nd gen had the best syncing experience by far! iTunes would sync as fast as that little 1.8" hard drive could handle, and there was a storage mode. -shrug-

I was not an early fan of the Ipod. I was already on my 2nd generation of MP3 player at that point. I wanted SPACE. I wanted to be able to carry all my music with me. I have never been able to do that. The best I have at this point is the ability to stream all my music. But that requires an internet connection and unlimited data. Additionally, I found iTunes to be atrocious--still do.

I will say I have an ipod nano that is about 10 years old that is useful for when I am working outside.

That sounds like your typical slashdot comment. By the law of large numbers, one of them is bound to become infamous.

That comment was from CmdrTaco, the guy who ran Slashdot back then. So more significant than some internet rando.

The law of large numbers establishes convergence (in probability or almost surely, depending on which version you choose) of the sample average to the population mean. This implies what you are saying but the simpler argument is just that if each /. comment has probability p > 0 of becoming infamous, then the probability of more at least one of n comments becoming infamous is 1 - (1 - p)^n -> 1.

No sdcard at least is pretty much a choice by google.

As a dev I would really like to see them disappear.

Just put enough memory in these phones by default and people won't have to use a shitty sdcard

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