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.
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?
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.
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.
Same is true for companies, with Apple one of a very few companies with deep expertise in both.
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.)
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...
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.
That said, it often took forever over USB, so the fast transfer speeds of FireWire was a big selling point.
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
"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-...
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.
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:
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.
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.
iPod made a thousand songs in your pocket a reality.
Edit: And HDD density / price per MB reaching a point where storing several dozen MP3s was noticeably more convenient than swapping CDs.
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.)
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.
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.
Oh, wait, which universe?
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
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.