The big problem was the interface, it really sucked to try and navigate a couple hundred MP3s on a one-line display.
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.
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.
It was, and still is, the best interface I've ever used for navigating through large, grouped lists.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.)
* I've had issues with some of the cheaper ones I've tried.
The 2004 ones were touch wheels with tap sensors
I had one of those, and it went into the recycle bin the moment I got an iPod.
Remember that CD-R is write once, not synchronize many times.
Also, the interface...
Good riddance.
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.
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.
But you're right, I did forget about the Jukebox and it was much more competitive.
[1] http://mikeschinkel.com/images/creative-technology.nomad-juk...
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.