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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

How widespread was optical digital out in 2001 compared to USB ports?

What mattered is whether it was easy to get pirated MP3s from the PC to the player. Fiddling around with optical digital out compared to the much simpler USB seems backwards.

MiniDisks might well have been superior to cassettes but compared to MP3 players? Ugh.

MiniDisks would have been pretty cool (at least for a short time) if you could have plugged them into a USB port.

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My point was not to debate MiniDiscs but that just about everything the OP is using to support their argument is factually inaccurate. It's basically gibberish with a little ZOMG APPLE/IPHONE indignation morsel thrown in at the end.

The OP was correct about saying that you need line-in. That’s what I, too, always perceived as the major downside of MiniDisk. (He said micro-in but already corrected himself on that. An honest mistake, he actually meant line-in. That doesn’t make it gibberish.)

when I bought my minidisc they were about $100, a comparable Creative flash based Mp3 player was 32Mb.

You could have a handful of disks with 80mins of HQ music on each whereas the MP3 players of the time were either very expensive (like the first harddisk iPod) or had so little space you had to chose a few songs for each trip.

The first MP3 player I bought had 128MB. (A Creative Muvo I bought in 2002.) I considered MiniDisk but having to use line-in seemed like such a hassle. (I didn’t have digital equipment and would have had to use the analog route and that just seemed like not worth it at all.)

I can understand how MiniDisk could have looked a bit more attractive a year or two earlier but not really in 2001 or 2002.

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