Comment by paulmd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulmd | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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