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Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

Apple was far from the first mover.

Rio was there first with a better product. Apple had better marketing though and the rest was history.

Which Diamond/Rio player was a better product than the iPod at the time it was taking over (~2001)? Apple certainly had good marketing with those multi-coloured dancing adverts ... but the product itself was pretty great.

Apple had DRM at that time and required special software to use.

Rio worked with anything and had no DRM. Any Rio was superior to all early iPods.

Rio “worked” with “anything”

As much as I hate DRM, it isn't something most consumers care about. The real selling points like the iPod's storage, case, materials, and branding were mainly unmatched for a long time.

Hang on, any Rio? Like the 32MB Rio PMP300? Is there a Rio product that competed directly with the iPod in the era that it took off? Remember that iPods only worked with the Mac (and its tiny market share) until the latter half of 2002 and only really took off in 2003. Rio aka SONICblue went bankrupt in March 2003, they barely competed head to head with Apple in mp3 players for a few months.

Apple Marketing was pretty overwhelming, but I'm afraid the Rio line was already doomed by the time the iPod began to dominate.

Also important to note that while Apple were very successful in music players, there are several successful competitors in that market, such as Sony and Sandisk.

In fact at the peak, the iPod's market share in music players was about the same as what Android has in smartphones today.

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