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Comment by paulie_a | Hacker News Reader

I never understood the love for the iPod, it was pretty mediocre. It did have iTunes integration which had the ability to purchase music and sync, but it had and still has a shitty interface.

Edit: I get that we have to worship Steve jobs, but the iPod wasn't revolutionary. Others before and after did it better.

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Not sure I understand the disagreement here; I think you're right on. I had an mp3 player before the iPod came out; it's not like iPod was the first mp3 player. The iPod had a nice external "look" and great marketing, but functionally it was much more difficult to use than other mp3 players that were available at that time. I was told iTunes worked better on the mac, but my experience using it on the PC was nothing short of painful. Other mp3 players had the capability of of using simple drag-and-drop functionality to move your mp3's over to the player, without the need to learn a new program and without forcing a different idea of music library management on the user.

The only thing I can remember it having was the smart playlist feature, where you could construct playlists using criteria like "Has at least 3 stars" and "Not played in five days" etc.

Though that was more of an iTunes feature, that I wouldn't mind seeing in Spotify!

It let you make auto-updating lists to keep your library fresh, and not rely on the shuffle feature.

“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

The market clearly values some attributes of devices differently from you. That’s fine, and it’s good that there are a variety of different decices out there to fulfill different needs. But “mediocre” or “shitty” are really not useful words in this context.

They absolutely are apt descriptions as an opinion. Clearly the iPod was wildly popular, I was questioning why and described my viewpoint of an "ok" device with plenty of competitors. That also had better interfaces.

The iPod got the first mover advantage when it comes to large MP3 players.

I had a Creative Nomad before the first iPod came out, which also had about 4GB of storage.

1. The Creative Nomad had a slow-refresh screen with mushy buttons, vs a wheel on smooth ball-bearings and a quickly refreshing screen and intuitive hierarchy to navigate

2. The iPod took about a second per song to transfer music with Firewire, compared to the ridiculously slow USB on the Creative Nomad

3. The Creative Zomad was a little larger than a Discman, and fit in a very large pocket. The iPod fit into jean pockets

To be fair firewire wasn't used all be that much. It really was under deployed. Apple didn't have the clout to push back then. When you are 5-10 percent of a market for twenty years, maybe they are not the power house they are known as

The nomad was far superior to the iPod in my experience (you didn't have to use the garage iTunes software). Currently the Dell XPS line kicks the shit out of anything apple has made. A pure Android pixel surpasses an iPhone in every way possible.

Not every way possible. The pixel is a great device, but in some small areas it can't even compete with the iPhone. For example, haptics. the current iPhone has haptics so much better than anyone else it's not even funny. And on the software side, they have the ridiculously user-friendly airDrop.

Sorry to say the iPhone might still be sorta competitive, but lost the war a while ago

And yes every way possible reason, its on my list "don't recommend unless I hate the person" if I could give a yelp review, it edge out Samsumng slightly

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