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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.

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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 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.

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