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Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

That last line about raising the bar... and raise it did! Apple often doesn't invent the whole thing, but definitely puts a usable version on the market. I remember the space between CD players and iPods having those rather crappy MP3 players, mini-disc players (which were actually quite good, but still used cartridges) and the really big laptop-HDD music players, and none of them were actually nice to use, or at least, not any 'nicer' than a portable CD player.

This happened over and over again with the other stuff they made. It's not like there were no phones with touchscreens, or no tablets, or no smartwatches, TV media players etc. There always are/were/will be, but it's becoming something of a trend that Apple gets it's hands on one of those ideas and then puts a version on the market that actually works well for most people.

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"Apple often doesn't invent the whole thing, but definitely puts a usable version on the market."

A common criticism of Apple is they just take technology that is most of the way there, then just make it usable. Of course, making it usable is often the hardest part and adds the most value for the consumer.

Something needs to exist before you can improve it. Continuing along those lines, the initial innovation to bring unique products to market is at least as important as polishing it.

In this case, what was the initial innovation that was at least as important as the iPod? Who made it?

MP3 encoding (Fraunhofer Institute) and the Arcos Jukebox (Arcos). Both paved the technical way for the huge usability and ergonomic improvements offered by the iPod.

Edit: And HDD density / price per MB reaching a point where storing several dozen MP3s was noticeably more convenient than swapping CDs.

MP3, definitely; that's a great pick. But do you really think using a hard drive instead of flash memory was a huge innovative leap? They didn't invent the hard drive. Both forms of storage existed at the time, and anyone could have picked one over the other.

The iPod hit the market pretty much together with 1.8" HDDs which proved to be a pretty nice sweet spot for a while. Flash costs became pretty unattractive in comparison for desirable capacities while larger drives led to clunky devices.

Not sure how one counts innovative but Apple chose a good horse to ride for storage that led to it being in an increasingly enviable position among MP3 players. (Which Apple parlayed into popular flash players and then the iPhone.)

Yes. In my opinion the 1.8" HDDs are the main technological feature that made the iPod possible.

To me, this was the most amazing thing about the iPod. 5GB inside this tiny package... it seemed impossible before I learned about those tiny hard drives.

As I understand it, of of Apple's big competitive advantages was that they contracted for essentially the entire output of 1.8 inch hard drives so no-one else could use them.

Yes, but only after they had a large volume of iPod sales, I think. Apple has also used their scale with iPhone to buy components in such large volumes none of their competitors can get a lower price, which means Apple can actually be price competitive when they perceive it in their interest to do so.

Great question! Perhaps tech related to mp3 compression and miniaturizing storage. I can't name any specific contributors, however.

While thinking about this it made me feel like that is an example of a powerful force of history - "to the victor goes the spoils." There was a lot of tech foundation innovated by competitors in related products that made the iPod possible but since the iPod was the breakout success of the era it's all some of us can remember.

It wasn't the first I'm sure, but I had a Creative Nomad MuVo. It was basically a flash drive, but with an audio out. It was super compact and powered by a AAA battery. I was pretty happy to upgrade to a spacious iPod, but the little nomad served well. Creative may have had others that predate the iPod?

The Diamond Rio comes to mind, as probably the first consumer one to get much attention (but "much attention" is relative, and it was still a niche market), but with only 32MB of storage, it was underwhelming (but also years earlier, in 1998).

The Remote Solutions Personal Jukebox looks to have been the first of the models to use a laptop drive instead of small and expensive flash, but at $799 for 4.8GB, it was very pricey (1999).

The Creative NOMAD Jukebox in late 2000 had 6GB for $429.

In late 2001, Apple introduces the iPod, which at 4GB for $399, is actually not quite as good in a dollar per GB metric.

I think it's clear that it's not really the idea that made the iPod take off, but the marketing, polish, and IMO most importantly, that they had a real software company work on it rather than a bunch of EE people. Not to denigrate electrical engineers, but often it's a different type of programming that goes into UI and UX, and having people that have worked on that for years can matter quite a bit.

1: http://www.pcworld.com/article/174725/evolution_of_the_mp3_p...

That's all about how I remember it.

I'd add though that, while the initial iPod received a generally positive reception, there was the usual Apple critique that it was on the pricey side. And there really wasn't a general market perception right away that everything was different now. For one thing, iTunes originally ran only on Macs--and Apple wasn't saying publicly that would ever change--so iPods were mostly usable with laptops/desktops that were pretty niche at the time.

Exactly. I bought a Diamond Rio when it first came out, but it was early. It was difficult to explain to non-techies.

Apple figured out how to tap into the early adopters and make them influencers to bring in the early majority. Part of this was making it easier for people to be able to get music on to the thing. iTunes had just come out shortly before the iPod and started hitting its stride in tandem with the device.

I'm curious, Why was it difficult to explain? Given the popularity of CD players, it seems like an mp3 player would be pretty easy to explain.

At one point I had a solid-state Sony NW-MS7 Memory Stick Walkman (that wasn't quite an MP3 player because it was limited to only playing ATRAC files). For 1999, it was a usable and forward-looking piece of tech. Pity they crippled it with aforementioned ATRAC-only encoding (requiring file format conversion and re-encoding) and expensive Memory Stick proprietary media.

Ah yes, Sony and expensive proprietary media. I remember paying a small fortune (for a teenager) for an 8 MB Memory Stick for use with the PlayStation 2.

> but the marketing, polish, and IMO most importantly, that they had a real software company

I think it is important to remember that when the iPod came out, iTunes already existed. Not the iTunes store, mind you, but iTunes as a solution to (legally) rip your existing CDs (and automatically get the tags/meta-information from OCDDB or so), and manage songs downloaded from Napster (less legally).

So, people had a good platform to listen to music on the desktop, nicely managed with lots of meta-information (tags, time last played, rankings, etc).

Now, with the iPod, you could JUST PLUG IT IN, and it would download the whole shebang within a couple of minutes (via Firewire), and offer it in a nice interface. THAT was a quantum leap in usability compared with all other devices on the market at the time.

I had a minidisk player, and you could add artist and song titles manually on the device (selecting a letter at a time with a left/right cursor), and my, what a pain it was.

Just having your whole (carefully curated) music library on the go in a a few minutes on the iPod was AWESOME.

It's often forgotten that the early versions of iTunes synced with several popular MP3 players of the era.

That said, it often took forever over USB, so the fast transfer speeds of FireWire was a big selling point.

Were other MP3 players supported before the iPod?

Wikipedia's iTunes history [1] says iPod support came in October 2001 (i.e. when the iPod was released), and Rio One support in December 2001, and doesn't really mention other MP3 players.

At any rate, the faithfulness with which the iPod presented the iTunes music library was great.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_iTunes#iTunes_2

January 9, 2001: "Apple Introduces iTunes — World’s Best and Easiest To Use Jukebox Software"

"download songs to popular MP3 players from Rio and Creative Labs with plug-and-play simplicity with no extra software or complicated driver installations required."

https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/01/09Apple-Introduces-...

Thanks!

Yes. Support for those other players was already present in SoundJam, and was carried over to early versions of iTunes essentially unchanged.

iTunes as a solution to (legally) rip your existing CDs

Technically, this wasn't any more legal than recording a CD to a cassette tape. It's still an infringing copy. It's just that nobody was ever sued for it, as far as I'm aware, and it's since been legalized in some places.

There were a few CDs with anti-rip technology (including the famous Sony rootkit CDs), but the industry largely gave up on that after losing the DRM war.

If workable DRM had been deployed fast enough, neither Napster nor the iPod would have existed. That's part of why the fight against DRM is important.

Actually it was legal - there was a piece of legislation on the time that called "fair use" make local copies for you own usage. So if you owned a CD, it was fair use to copy to your own iPod.

Depends on the jurisdiction, obviously.

But Apple was actually marketing iTunes with the slogan "Rip. Mix. Burn." and put out this awesome ad featuring De La Soul, Iggy Pop, Barry White, and others. Check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECN4ZE9-Mo

I had a Diamond Rio, and it's was way better than any Apple product. One week with a single AAA battery for 4h by days at least.

Way better if your music collection consisted of 12 songs.

iPod made a thousand songs in your pocket a reality.

Technically speaking, Creative Labs did that. You just needed a slightly larger pocket :-)

Even if it's not a lot of mp3, I was able to change the mp3 without buying something and this at that time was a revolution. Even if it was not perfect, they made the revolution Apple did nothing.

Who created the universe?

God.

Oh, wait, which universe?

Oh, sorry, I was trying to bake a pie.

> Of course, making it usable is often the hardest part and adds the most value for the consumer.

As someone that considers UX and a user-centric approach to technology as their "edge" compared to most technologists, this is what keeps surprising me - because honestly it doesn't seem to me like it actually is or should be the "hardest" part at all. Compared to something like, say, solving differential equations, then I'd say that it seems fairly obvious, trivial even, to practice basic empathy and ask simple questions like "What could an average person get out of this technology?" and "How many of the technical details could we handle automatically so people don't have to bother with them yet still get most of the benefits?". At most I'd say it's the last 10-20% of the work on top of all the hard work on the tech (not because it's a small amount of work, but because the tech that comes before is so hard and time-consuming). But the company that gets the final part right gets most of the rewards (Pareto FTW!). Yet for some reason this tends to be different companies, doing the ground work and successfully commercializing the tech - why is that? Is it that hard to foster both a deeply tech-oriented and user-oriented culture in the same company? Is it too costly to invest in building expertise in both areas, so companies tend to choose one or the other? Is it because B2C is much higher risk than B2B, so it attracts a different kind of entrepreneurs?

When you're deep into the tech it's difficult to see beyond. You get used the rough edges and even grow to like and appreciate them.

It can take a fresh pair of eyes to look at things and see a different way forward, and then be bold enough to try. This usually involves stripping away features to make things more simple. That's not always a popular choice in engineering circles.

In technology, it's especially tricky to think about the 'average user' when you're surrounded by other technologists.

Often this means providing an abstraction which won't break for most users. sadly, such abstractions are often like a duck - paddling madly under the water.

Honestly man, I can handle math without issues. Differential equations are no big deal. But if you ask me to design a workflow, I'm going to give you the blankest stare ever because I don't even have a clue where to start. I can probably kludge something together based on how I could see someone else using the product, but in all likelihood, I'm just training myself to do it the way that's most natural for whatever I'm building.

Empathy is one piece of design. But if you can't visualize different modes of operation, you can't choose the most empathetic one. I suspect the real issue is that people with both deep technology and ux skills are rare. They require you to keep two entirely different problem spaces in your head and explore them together.

"I suspect the real issue is that people with both deep technology and ux skills are rare."

Same is true for companies, with Apple one of a very few companies with deep expertise in both.

"...because honestly it doesn't seem to me like it actually is or should be the "hardest" part at all."

Think about the amount of "empathy" that went into the first iPhone. All of the work to design an efficient way to display information and navigate on such a small device. Pinch to zoom. Inertial scrolling. Virtual keyboard to maximize screen space when you aren't typing. Swiping to navigate. Both dreaming up solutions like this and then making them real is extremely hard work and requires a lot of skill, talent, and knowledge.

It's not clear to me that making a smaller hard drive or a faster CPU or a screen with more pixels, are necessarily harder problems to solve than the kind of user experience problems Apple tackles. (Or used to tackle, depending on your view of post-Jobs Apple.)

I invent a wheel

Steve Jobs uses the wheel to create a cart, a wheelbarrow, a chariot and eventually, a bicycle

Does my wheel invention matter more or Steve Jobs' cart invention?

Because by itself, a wheel is useless

Both are important. You can argue in circles about the relative importance.

The wheel is a platform innovation, the value of which lies mostly in its conceptual existence which enables useful applications of it. No wheel, no useful applications of the wheel.

The steam engine is another platform innovation. By itself, all a stream engine does is is sit there, eat resources, and belch white smoke. Combine it with some wheels and a large cart. Now you have a game-changing transportation method.

There were also CD players that could play MP3s burned on a data disc. That bridged the "capacity gap" - 640/700 MB was a lot of MP3s at the time, especially since people used lower bitrates. Remember, the first iPod was only 5 GB.

The big problem was the interface, it really sucked to try and navigate a couple hundred MP3s on a one-line display.

Yeah that spinning click wheel was genius at the time.

Why? It allowed navigating up and down. And you could select. A simple plus sign like button did this.

You obviously never used one. It gave you full, immediate control over how fast you scrolled, which buttons could never do. It enabled you to immediately change direction without lifting your finger. You could start by placing your finger anywhere on the wheel, which made it easy to use in the dark, and moving your finger from the wheel to the button in the center was just as easy.

It was, and still is, the best interface I've ever used for navigating through large, grouped lists.

I've used one. I find them a little annoying when it comes to selecting the actual song. Not a real problem, but neither was using a regular button.

You could also adjust the volume through your pants, at least with some versions. It was just sensitive enough that I could do this with jeans without having to stick my hand in my pocket. Honestly this was one of my favorite features, at least until the headphone remotes.

That is exactly why Apple cleaned up and previous players didn't.

From a technical point, that is correct. From a usability point, it isn't - because it took a previously digital control (button pressed or not) and made it feel analog (just turn the wheel).

And it's much easier to precisely navigate over large distances with an analog(-feeling) control.

Of course it wasn't only the wheel that made a difference, but it was the mindset behind it: Take things that to most engineers are functionally equivalent and choose the one that makes it easier for the user. Or find something that makes it easier for the user.

That is a lesson that many of the products of our industry are still missing. What matters is not only functionality, but how easily and intuitively I as a user can access that functionality.

Not only still missing, but largely extinct. Analog displays had two brightness/contrast dials (or knobs? can't find a word), and you just rotated it until done. Now I have to use crappy OSD menu with 4 plus/minus/up/down/enter/exit/auto/mode/etc dynamic buttons each time I need to adjust these. Some manufacturers' ui designers are even so dumb that put unobvious logic into it like when you first press minus, it adjusts contrast, and when plus, it is brightness. HOW could that happen to the industry?

Because it was tactile, and allowed for you to spin at higher and lower speeds. Good luck pressing a button with any velocity at all, and I've never seen the "press and hold for higher speeds" thing done half as well. Not to mention that it completely lacks in terms of feedback.

The smartest thing they did with the click wheel after the wheel itself was the little clicking noise they played as you spun it. It made it feel mechanical, and gave you immediate feedback about how fast you were going.

I remember hearing that Phil Schiller came up with that idea.

Apple really wouldn't be Apple without him. He's the guy who had the goal of making a laptop with one port. He's the guy who's on board with removing the headphone jack. He's the guy making decisions that piss a lot of people off but understands what makes their products uniquely Apple.

Having one good idea doesn't mean that all of those are good ideas.

Any company can add a bunch of ports and say "yes" to everything. It's characteristic of Apple to piss people off in the short term and keep things focused.

Personally I wish the MacBook had 2 ports, but I love that Phil's philosophy is "what if we made a notebook with just one port?"

Personally I wish the MacBook had 2 ports,

Me too, but I have come to appreciate the whole product experience. I went from the MacBook Air 13" to a MacBook 12". I cycle to work nearly daily and take my MacBook in my backpack. Yesterday I had to connect my wife's MacBook Air 13" and then I realized that I forgot how heavy it is.

If you need a laptop that is so light and thin, something's got to give. If removing a few ports and a CPU fan brings you there, it's like it is.

(Before someone says that you have the extra weight of an USB-C to display/USB-A adapter: the MacBook 12" charger is also smaller and lighter than the MacBook Air charger.)

Plus you can charge the Macbook from any* 2.4A USB charger with appropriate cable - and since I'm already carrying two of those for the iPad and iPhone, there's no need to carry the USB-C brick as well.

* I've had issues with some of the cheaper ones I've tried.

The real innovations come from saying "what if we made a notebook with no ports?"

Obligatory Onion News reference: http://www.theonion.com/video/apple-introduces-revolutionary...

The Click Wheel wasn't until the 4G though in 2004. That was my first and that's arguably when the iPod really broke out.

Pretty sure the 1st iPod had the click wheel. It was a mechanical wheel with a separate button in the middle to click.

The 2004 ones were touch wheels with tap sensors

Yes, but it's the 4G and successors that AFAIK had the selector that was dubbed the "Click Wheel." Previous models had a mechanical scroll wheel that looked somewhat similar and which incrementally added touch functions but when people talk about the click wheel they're normally referring to the tap sensors in the iPod Mini & the 4G and followons.

And sound quality.

> CD players that could play MP3s [...] bridged the "capacity gap"

But collecting and (forever) burning collections was a royal pain in the ass. Plus, CD readers would struggle and skip/stop/jump all the time as they bounced in your pocket or in your bag.

> The big problem was the interface

Absolutely. A lot of cheap Chinese sticks wouldn't even understand filesystem structures deeper than one level. To be fair though, the iPod Shuffle was basically like that and still sold very well; the reality distortion field was in full force at that time.

> But collecting and (forever) burning collections was a royal pain in the ass. Plus, CD readers would struggle and skip/stop/jump all the time as they bounced in your pocket or in your bag

Well, after the first generation of CD players they wised up and added high-speed drives that read into buffers ("skip-proof"/"ESP"/etc) so that skipping wasn't a big deal. Since MP3s were a smaller quantity of data, they actually worked better at this.

Ideally you wanted a player that could read CD-RWs (whether full of audio tracks or MP3 files). Still a pain in the ass but less expensive. Not all players used a laser that could read RW media. And not all media used to be readable by all drives in those days - some drives were very very sensitive. I remember the horror of desperately searching DVDR-Help.com to try and find media with good compatibility ratings.

The thing that always amused me as a kid was how indestructable my Sony Discman CD player was. I went through probably 4 or 5 off-brand CD and MP3-CD players that had skip-proof before I finally switched to MP3 players. Every time they'd conk out after a year or two and I'd have to fall back to that stupid skip-prone Discman. The thing was built like a tank and I wouldn't be surprised if it still worked today, 20 years later. When I replaced it with an early iRiver HDD player in 2003 I shelled out like two years of savings for it, and that iRiver ended up lasting a decade. It was an important lesson for young me: you get what you pay for.

> Absolutely. A lot of cheap Chinese sticks wouldn't even understand filesystem structures deeper than one level.

That too, but I was really thinking about the scroll-wheel there. I can still remember the interminable pain of scrolling through a giant list of albums at about 2 per second. The iPod scroll wheel and the Zen Vision M's touch-strip were massive improvements for how they let you scroll rapidly but also have fine control.

The iRiver fixed it with firmware brute-forcing (in Rockbox). All you had was a D-pad but it would scroll exponentially faster the longer you held it down, so you could actually get where you wanted to go in a reasonable amount of time. Not elegant but it worked.

My first MP3 player was solid state and cheap, but it only had 32MB of storage. I would put 5 or 6 songs on it in the morning and listen to them on my way to work. I think a lot of my music back then was from Napster, and I intentionally sought out low-bit rate files. The iPod seemed fantastically expensive.

Rio? I had one too. Thought it was the coolest thing ever. I coukdn't wait to get the 64mb "expansion pack"

To be honest, the Nomad was fairly decent too, though the Creative brand couldn't command the premium price as well as Apple.

They must have offered a few versions of the Nomad, cuz mine was crap. And oh dear $deity, the software for loading it up from Windows had a terrible UI, no flexibility in organizing songs...

Good riddance.

The bundled software was always crappy. Luckily the protocol was simple and people reverse engineered it quickly. I used some linux command line tool to manage files on it.

The Nomad was pretty much just a rebranded Samsung Yepp YP-D40.

It had 64MB of flash storage and a parallel port connector compared to the 5GB and Firewire 400 that the iPod had, the Nomad/Yepp YP-D40 was fairly decent compared to a lot of the crap that was out there, but it didn't deserve a premium price.

Perhaps you should compare the iPod to the Nomad Jukebox line from around the iPod's release, instead of the Nomad 1 from the 90's.

Jukebox 1 had 6GB storage, USB 1.1, and came out nearly a year before iPod 1. Jukebox 2 came out the following year, had 30GB storage, and used USB 2.0.

The Nomad 1 came out in 1999 so it wasn't so very long before the iPod's 2001 release.

But you're right, I did forget about the Jukebox and it was much more competitive.

Creative had an mp3 player that was shaped like a portable CD player [1]. I guess the idea was that it was a form factor that people were already comfortable with. If you're looking for a reason why Apple ended up on top of the portable mp3 market, this example always seemed to sum it up for me. Apple has its faults, but (with reference to the fake Henry Ford quote) it's never been the sort of company that sold its customers faster horses.

[1] http://mikeschinkel.com/images/creative-technology.nomad-juk...

Ooh, I had one of those in high school, saved up for months! I loved that thing - lots of space, it read song info from the files, supported playlists and had space for dozens of albums! DOZENS! Admittedly it ate 4 AA batteries in as many hours, but who cares? It was just as big as a discman, but SO MUCH MORE AWESOME. Used it every day on the school bus.

I kinda wanted an iPod when they came out, but as I grew up in a strict Dos & Windows home, that was out of the question.

They were also quite huge.

I had one of those, and it went into the recycle bin the moment I got an iPod.

The problem with those CDMP3 players were the size, they didn't really work when you trembled the player (huge), and they rarely accepted CD-RW.

Remember that CD-R is write once, not synchronize many times.

Also, the interface...

This was my first portable MP3 player:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_500

I still like the form factor and interface, but the storage was very limited. It could also be expanded with SmartMedia cards.

Second one was this MP3 CD player:

https://www.amazon.com/RioVolt-Portable-Player-Second-Anti-S...

I had one of these badboys, which I filled with music from DC++ (those were the days.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series

I wish I still had it so I could laugh at how big and heavy it is, with its 20gb spinning disk and those big blue rubber bumpers. Learned a lot putting different homebrew firmwares on it.

Also big shoutout to the Cowon iAudio series. Those things did sterling service for years. Just thinking of the brightly coloured menus is sending me back to my teenage days.

Oh man, I actually forgot I owned that. How could I forget? Those bumpers were so big and blue.

The Archos Jukebox was the player that introduced me to Rockbox[0]. Great player for the time, but as you said it was huge. I think I even put in a larger drive at some point.

These days I run rockbox on an iPod. The hardware is better but rockbox is still IMHO the best interface for a portable music player.

[0] http://www.rockbox.org

I got a free Rio 500 from the website PointClick during the height of .com insanity. That thing was easily one of the greatest consumer electronics products of all time.

Does anyone know the inside story of what ever happened to that product line? I read that Diamond sold the assets, but didn't find anything beyond that. (Though I would note that their earlier model, the PMP300, looks suspiciously like the first iPod.)

The Rio IP and engineers went to Sigmatel [1], who essentially turned the firmware for the Rio Karma into a reference firmware for their MP3 player SoCs. The Trekstor Vibez [2] was probably the most well-known player that used that platform.

By the way, the Karma firmware was really ahead of other players of the time, supporting perfect gapless playback, Vorbis and FLAC support, and on the fly playlist editing. The iPod never got on the fly playlist editing, which I really missed when I moved over to using one from a Karma.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/27/sigmatel_rio_deal/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrekStor_Vibez

The Diamond Rio was amazing because it was seen by IT companies and the record labels as an illegal product. It spawned a lawsuit "Recording Industry Ass'n of America v. Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc.". Without DMM winning this lawsuit (against all odds), there would be no MP3 players worldwide, there would be no iPod, there would be no iPhone, there would be no Apple as we know it today.

Not as old, but I still have my Sansa c250:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sansa_c200_series

It's my most portable FM radio. I'd rather use the FM chip on my smartphone, I know it's there, but the manufacturer could not be bothered to enable it. So I keep my little Sansa around. Only had to replace the Li-Ion battery once.

Rockbox makes it even nicer:

https://www.rockbox.org/

That's the first one I had, a 128MB version I think. Great for riding a bike with because you could operate it without looking.

The Rio 500 was the first MP3 player I ever used. I thought it was incredible :)

The Volt was the first MP3 player I ever owned. I loved that device. 700 MB of music, and I could burn as many CDs as I wanted... That thing was great.

Yes a rio. Those were great. And you could just mount 'em in linux without having to go through the dreadful apple software. Way better.

I was a college freshman going from home dial up BBS's to a major university's internet speeds. Ripped a bunch of CD's to that Diamond Rio and loved running instead of using my tape player to make running playlists. I remember some type of way to reencode the mp3's in Windows on the fly to fit more on the tiny storage. I think Apple getting their connection into aftermarket car radios at the time was a big factor in a universal standard which made having an iPod almost necessary for people driving. My standout MP3 players were the Diamond Rio and Creative Muvo 4GB. The smaller iPod mini was really nice for running though.

My Cowon iAudio 7 is still going strong, and I don't know what I'll do when it dies. I like having a standalone music player that plays ogg-vorbis, and presents as a mass storage device.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAUDIO#iAUDIO_7

The big innovation was often the willingness to charge more. When Apple came out with the original iphone it was $600 at a time when high-end phones were $200. (And it couldn't even run programs! What I really don't get is why Sharp/HP/etc. never made a PocketPC that had phone functionality built in).

Many people thought the market that would pay $600 for a phone didn't exist. I guess that's part of the power of being a recognized luxury brand - you can sell a product that's twice the cost of the alternatives, but people will be ok with buying it, because they'll have enough faith in you to deliver something that's worth that much.

I am sorry but you're wrong. Nokia's high-end phones were costing similar money: " The launch price of the N95 was around €550 (about US$730, GB£370)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95

Indeed, plus:

What I really don't get is why Sharp/HP/etc. never made a PocketPC that had phone functionality built in)

There were many PocketPC-based smartphones (PDA-phones), even from HP and Sharp.

Also, many inexpensive phones could run third-party apps, albeit crappy Java ME-based.

> There were many PocketPC-based smartphones (PDA-phones), even from HP and Sharp.

Really? I remember spending quite a while comparing specs before getting an ASUS A730W. I remember a few interesting-sounding Zauruses (Zaurodes?) that were never released in the west, but nothing I could actually buy.

> Also, many inexpensive phones could run third-party apps, albeit crappy Java ME-based.

True - but they really were crappy. Whereas my PDA ran real programs - it was relatively easy to port and build existing C++ code (the UI toolkit was different, but all UI toolkits were different in those days).

Really?

HP had some iPAQ smartphones and Google tells me Sharp also produced something (for Japanese market). But yes, many manufacturers didn't make their devices available worldwide, so it depends on market. In Russia we had lots of Qtek/HTC devices.

I had one of the "things sharp produced" that was actually released in the west. If it had a cellular modem in it and they still made it I would have never bought a smartphone.

I am sorry but he is not. The original iPhone sold for $499-$599 WITH contract. The N95 was about that much WITHOUT a contract.

You're comparing subsidized phones with sim unlocked phones.

>This happened over and over again with the other stuff they made.

I heard someone (maybe Jon Gruber) once say that Apple doesn't invent sliced bread, or cold cuts, or bib lettuce or condiments. They invent the sandwich.

Come on, MDs came out in late 1992. Let that sink in for a moment.

Reminds me of the fast follower strategy:

https://hbr.org/2012/06/first-mover-or-fast-follower

I still am honestly dumbfounded as to how the ipod won. I bought one of the originals. After having 3 of them die in less than 6 months I finally sold the 4th on ebay. Everytime it died I had to pay circuit city $100 to "renew" the warranty. Best I can tell the vibration from having it in my pocket while walking to class was killing the shit hard drives they used in the first gen.

I then bought a panasonic sd80 music player. Used sdcards to store music - I STILL have that panasonic player. I literally had it fly off my arm and bounce off a wall while doing sprints in a gym. Plugged it in and it was still playing. It still plays more formats in higher quality than the original iPod. Congrats on the marketing Apple, it definitely wasn't about having a superior product.

I wish it had won out, it was superior in every way. http://www.qvc.com/Panasonic-SV-SD80-e-Wear-Micro-MP3-Player...

_Every way_?

Literally every way. The only downside was having to use rhapsody to load music - but I can just barely call that a downside since there was no supported method to load music onto an iPod on Windows at that point. So you either bought a mac, or used third party software and hoped they stayed in front of the Apple DRM police.

> I wish it had won out, it was superior in every way

Uh, a 64MB SD card is a lot smaller than a 5GB hard drive. The iPod stored 93x more songs. If the SV-SD80 had been able to store 1000 songs instead of ~11 songs, then navigating them would not have worked at all. The iPod was in an entirely different market.

128MB cards were out the same year the ipod was. They also cost about $30. I'll take two CDs per card over an iPod that dies if you breath on it wrong any day of the week.

EDIT: world-wide market share (that I didn't find good numbers on in first search) also was (to) surprisingly high, so my impression was clearly wrong. Still interesting that such a specific device (and thus market segment: expensive mp3 players with hard disks) dominates so much.

I honestly can only name 2 people I know that owned iPods of various kinds, in an era where nearly everybody around me had some kind mp3 playing device.

Because iPods were 70%+ of the entire MP3 player market worldwide for years? That's certainly a valid definition of "won" in my book.

Your personal anecdotes are not data.

My original iPod still worked when my last FireWire Mac gave up.

For a long time the iPod was the only device capable of making sense of the huge, chaotic mess of file people had after making "file sharing" a hobby. The competition had perfectly workable solutions for the amount of data you would get from buying CDs or doing the occasional "backup copy", but only Apple was providing tools for to comfortably deal with the massive increase in music availability. And the high price nicely fitted the inverse budget gap left when people stopped to buy music. Apple was pretty much saved by music piracy before using that position to become the biggest music distributor themselves, all while still not having properly bought the bootlegged trademark from Apple Corp.

my original iPod still works to this day, of course I haven't used it in ages.

On second "Lord of the Rings" movie, "The Two Towers" extended edition DVD, is a making of documentary. Peter Jackson explains that internet connection in New Zealand was so slow, that the special effects artists used their iPods to copy data on it to work at home in London.

Yes I think this is why the iWatch has largely been a failure. There wasn't really a watch out there that was getting real traction despite itself so that apple could come along and add the missing ingredients and "boom"! It's the downside of when there is so much pressure to have "another hit" but your skill isn't creating something out of thin air but rather taking something that has real upside if you can get all the pieces of the ecosystem (hw/sw/contentproviders) to hum together.

Iphones and Macs don't work well for most people. Apple only has a 10-20% share of the global smartphone market and 7% of the PC market.

I don't think it's very special to make a good product that's expensive. Competitors satisfy more people by making a still-pretty-good product that's less expensive.

The thing that put apple products above and beyond other products that were the same was marketing. Apple is great at creating hype.

Personally i will never buy an apple product. Mostly because of the insane prices but partially out of principal and practicality (as their products are in their own world).

Since then, competitors caught up, and Apple's quality of both software and hardware has started a steady decline.

Then again, people have said that since the first iPod.

I need more 10 more hands to count all the "iPod killers" and "iPhone killers" that were stomped.

The real iPod killer was the iPhone . They disrupted themselves and usually companies don't want to do that .

Considering what we ended up with, Apple would probably be in serious financial trouble if they didn't disrupt themselves.

I just wish they'd still make a decent iPod. All I want is a really light music player with physical buttons, like the first few generations of the iPod Nano.

I'm aware this is probably a fairly small market, but it's gotta be bigger than whoever's buying the current pricey Nano with its crappy faux-iOS touch interface.

I still use my classic iPod. I'm amazed the thing still works. I expected the hard disk to fail long ago. I had to replace the battery twice, but that's only a few dollars nowadays.

I still use my classic 5th gen with Wolfson DAC daily - it's plugged into my car. My hard drive did fail and I found a guy on eBay that took out my hard drive and replaced with 500gb ssd card. All lossless, all the time. It's awesome and extremely light too.

I don't think many people still use anything other than their phones for portable music players. Doesn't make sense to carry another device.

Heck, lots of people given up on compact cameras, where phones are still (and will be for the foreseeable future) subpar in quality, and they will carry another device just for music that doesn't really add anything?

I'm actually considering from time to time to get a separate portable music player, so that I can go to work without the phone and not get distracted by it all the time.

There have been worthy competitors but none with the finish quality and marketing budget of Apple.

The iRiver MP3 players were fantastic throughout most of the 2000s (unfortunate choice of name, they existed pre-iPod). They were the player of choice for the technical crowd because they supported line-in recording, optical outputs, and OGG playback (which mattered a lot more when capacities were smaller). They had an average-quality interface, usable but not amazing.

They were also one of the main bastions for the open-source Rockbox firmware, which supported a huge variety of codecs and WAV recording. Rockbox's appearance was utilitarian but it actually featured many great usability tweaks (exponential scrolling/FF/rewind, "car mode" that paused playback when power was lost, bookmarks, etc). They were an amazing player for someone who could do hardware mods. I kept mine going for a decade by swapping parts. I eventually used an adapter to plug in a CompactFlash card for a primitive SSD, and installed a high-capacity battery, which boosted the battery life to something absurd like 20 hours IIRC.

On that note I still don't actually know anything that can touch the battery life of the early iRiver flash players (iFP series). We're talking 24 hours on a single AA. I've actually been looking for a replacement with those same characteristics (extreme battery life on a single disposable AA or AAA battery cell) and coming up empty. You would really think there'd be a successor using modern electronics but everyone has gone to integrated batteries. Anyone know of one?

The Creative Zen Vision M was another really solid attempt. The scroll-strip was a worthy competitor for the (patented) Apple scrollwheel. Nice fit and finish, just couldn't make any waves in the market.

To think the continuing success of Apple comes purely down to make I think is extremely condescending to a very wide range of consumers.

Marketing can only get you in the door for you to buy the first product. You have to actually make something good in order to get customers to come back.

I think the point the parent was trying to make wasn't that Apple products were only so-so but had great marketing, just that there were a few other products that were nearly as good, but couldn't market the way Apple did.

(Follow the Principle of Charity, please.)

That's exactly what I mean. Even today I think the personal electronics market is a particularly difficult one to disrupt unless your product is so astoundingly better that it pretty much sells itself like the iPod did. Even so, things can easily go south, like when the RIAA sued Rio. That would kill someone who wasn't already a mid-sized corp at that time.

Things were much harder to disrupt then, too. It was much tougher for someone to get access to short-run PCB design and assembly services and you couldn't get SOC do-everything modules for random tasks nearly as easily back then. You really needed to be an established manufacturer who could order a big run of products and/or custom chips. The smaller you were, the smaller the production run, the more your products would cost.

Personal electronic Kickstarters are still some of the most likely to fail. There's lots of reasons for that. It's hard to execute well, and consider how easily HTC loop-the-looped Oculus' design and out-ramped their production. And that's in 2016, using a new design for a sophisticated product. China will have knockoffs of most products on Alibaba literally before your product is in stores.

There were some good competitors but it's a really, really hard market to break into, even if you've got a great product. Apple is the HTC of this scenario, they were a big company that saw a great idea they could do better and executed well, jumping ahead of the original creators.

I don't hold any particular grudge against Apple. I resent the scroll wheel being patented, but that's because I am generally opposed to design/UI elements being patentable. You shouldn't get a 30-year monopoly on something like that.

> You have to actually make something good in order to get customers to come back.

Well, that's not strictly true, is it? You have to make something which actually feels good. And iPods definitely ended up doing that.

I don't have anything against the Creative Zen, but it just looked like another weird/silly looking MP3 box that wasn't an iPod to my undiscerning eyes.

I remember an awful product placement for the Zen on Smallville. There was some woman with a Zen. The Zen was supposed to be so alluring, it captured the eyes of the rich and powerful Lex Luthor and compelled him to approach the woman.

For a series about an alien from another planet who is faster than a speeding bullet and so forth, I found it funny that this is the scene that broke the suspension of disbelief for me.

I hate the term "iPod/iPhone killer," especially these days. Did the smartphone "kill" the iPod? Maybe kinda but people still use them. Did Android "kill" the iPhone because it's market share is 85%? Well, no, people still use iPhones and Apple is doing quite well. There's no one device that's going to kill any other, and there doesn't need to be. Multiple devices can exist in the same space.

I think you mean Apple's quality of execution has gone up and down.

There was no prelapsarian apple-of-perfection: they released amazing things and also released utter turds.

I've been pretty much exclusively Apple for 20 years (laptops) and phones (since they shipped them), and the watch (vs other fitness trackers I've used). In the aggregate they haven't sucked as much as the alternatives.

In other places (servers, wifi base stations, office software, music software) I've switched back and forth and currently don't think Apple is worth it. It doesn't have to be a religious issue.

Oh and the original iPod? It was amazing!

> (servers, wifi base stations, office software, music software)

And how about workstations, high quality monitors, video and photo editing software?

The thing is, while Apple's main focus was never spreadsheets or enterprise SW, it once produced the go-to computers for creative professionals (musicians, photographers, video makers, designers). I believe that Apple is losing its edge in that field, because they are exclusively focusing on consumer devices and software.

The Mac Pro hasn't been updated in years; Aperture has been killed, Final Cut went from being a professional product to a "prosumer" one, Logic still seems to be doing OK but latest updates of Mac OS broke compatibility with many pieces of SW used by musicians (e.g. Ableton, NI Maschine etc), the list could go on...

>> The Mac Pro hasn't been updated in years

It's not like they were up to date before. Old video cards, USB 2.0...

And it wasn't that great before those. The G5's were watercooled and would leak all over, not to mention slow, the G3 and G4 towers were upgraded so fast they obsoleted each other as soon as they came out, and didn't have support for all their features in OS 9.

As unsexy as the Mac Pro line was, all they needed to do was keep the latest round of I/O (SATA 3, followed by USB 3, then USB 3.1, ThunderBolt) and just updated CPUs and GPUs without bothering to change the form factor. I'm still rolling a 2008 Mac Pro heavily updated. As someone who contracted for 3 Hollywood shows, I can tell you everyone jumped Final Cut Pro X for Avid or Premier Pro. It was sad.

When they touted the Mac Pro 2013 as a computer you could carry to a set to do editing, a friend of my quipped "Clearly no one at Apple has any fucking idea how movies or TV show are made."

That said, as long time digital musician 10.9+ hasn't been a problem for Maschine, Ableton, Cubase or Logic. I still have soft synths that are nearly 10 years old from the first Intel mac days working just fine...

Yes all products that raised the bar and made Apple what it's become were under Job's rule.

Tim Cook is a money guy only and as a long time apple fan and Siri user I'm bored and disappointed! Google Now is amazing and I'm longing for something more exciting then my recently bought iPhone 7.

The Pixel looks very interesting but it's only on Verizon.

It's not only on Verizon. Verizon is the only carrier that sells it at the store.

If you want to buy a Pixel in-store, then yes, it's only on Verizon.

If you buy one from the Google Store, it's unlocked, and it should work on most major US carriers. (See "Channels" under "Specs & More": https://store.google.com/product/pixel_phone)

Disclaimer: I work at YouTube, which is a part of Google.

Steve Jobs deserves a great deal of respect but I do think you're forgetting the less great parts. They had lackluster updates, products which went years too long without a meaningful update (e.g. all laptops for the half decade prior to the Intel switch), the iTunes UI started getting worse in every release around the early 2000s, until a few years ago their attitude about security was borderline negligence, they shamelessly ignored long-standing customers who kept them alive through the dark years[1], and every cloud service they offered until the last year or two was a user-hostile disaster.

The key, of course, is that a few big wins make up for a lot of that but the other side of that lesson is that most people will do better with consistent solid execution rather than spreading themselves too thin trying for a huge win. Apple could easily have been Palm or SGI if one of those long-shots hadn't paid off.

1. Our Apple higher-ed rep used to respond to critical bug reports by asking how many Macs we couldn't purchase due to that bug.

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