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.

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.

Rio “worked” with “anything”