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Comment by ddlatham | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree that having enough storage space for your full collection was an important differentiator.

But the thing is that the iPod wasn't the first to market for that either.

I remember having the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Jukebox and loving it before the iPod came along.

I don't think it was just the storage size that was the difference. It was the combination of a well designed simple UI together with excellent marketing that seemed to make the difference.

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Two other factors that are often overlooked in the early success of the ipod:

400mb/s Firewire let you actually put a lot of files on it in a reasonable amount of time. The theoretical 11mb/s of USB 1.1 was painfully slow in comparison.

The ipod was _tiny_ compared to the other hard drive based mp3 players of the time.

I remember it was slow to load up at the beginning, but that since it held all my music, I wasn't constantly switching what music was on the device, only occasionally loading a small new set of files, so the slow transfer didn't make much difference to me. Perhaps others had a different case where the transfer speed mattered more.

I also remember iTunes (despite it's fall from grace later on) to be miles ahead of any syncing app. The difference in just plugging your iPod in and choosing which music to sync vs. erasing/reformatting/error-handling transfers to your mp3 was lightyears. That was part of what did it for me.

Also, on the iPod you could browse your music in an organized fashion (e.g. by artist), whereas with other mp3 players it was just a long list of tracks.

I can't tell you any other mp3 player commercial from that era. They were all kind of relegated to bestbuy fliers. The iPod was advertising with the colored background and the white headphones. It was good clear advertising and it was playing during the superbowl.

There's always been better mp3 players but normies don't know about them.

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