20 years of the iPod
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Even now that Macs are an option in most FAANG+, most non-fresh-grad hires either pick Linux or Windows machines and completely avoid Macs.
As someone who normally attends quite a few tech conference events, that doesn't square remotely with what I see. Macs are out of all proportion to their percentage in the world at large. While it's harder to have an inventory of the rest, I assume they're mostly Linux given that one hardly ever sees a speaker presenting from a Windows laptop. [ADDED: This is in the context of events that are not Microsoft-centric.]
Most media producers today switched to Windows.
I have seen even how some companies dropped supporting some of their hardware in Linux without any reasonable cause or problem (some models of TI MSP430), and having to use third party tools in order to continue working in Linux.
I do my embedded development pretty much exclusively using GCC on the Mac or Linux.
A bit surprising as of
Why wouldn't they just go with the official, well-supported tools
ARM was one of the few embedded vendors not paying for GCC support. Our UK office was down the road from them in Cambridge and they asked us around a lot but always wanted the word done for free.
Only thing its missing is LDAC for Bluetooth. The difference is noticeable when you have headset that actually supports it.
I've switched to using an Apple Watch to have wireless headphones but it's not great; syncing to the Watch's storage (I don't want my phone on me at the gym) is slow and the Podcast app can be wonky. Just today it stopped playing an episode in the middle for no apparent reason and I couldn't get it to start again. Some of this may be because it's a Series 1 Watch but newer models seem too expensive for possibly not that much better an experience.
Enter Steve Jobs, whose new device was perfect for playing those 1000 MP3 tracks you just downloaded from file sharing networks.
And while legit digital music downloads would set the stage for today's online music scene, digital purchases were never that big a chunk of the market and declined fairly quickly given streaming.
When Apple made iTunes for Windows, Steve Jobs called it “It's like giving somebody a glass of hell in ice water.” [1]
I mean, was Windows Media Player really that bad? I still miss the visualizations and even the fancy skins. iTunes in comparison was very dull and barely changed in 20 years.
And WMP was awful, and got more awful each time. Winamp on the other hand was great, it really kicked the llama's ass.
It is probably the primary reason I told the spouse to “get in the car, we’re going to the Apple Store to buy iPods.” As a Microsoft employee at the time, I’d had my fill of trying to make Microsoft’s shit music player ecosystem work out of some misplaced sense of company loyalty. Playlists wouldn’t sync, and all kinds of that ilk I’ve long since forgotten. And that’s before we get to PlaysForSure…
As the story notes, it was immediately "special" due to the polish, relative ease of use, and internal micro-HDD that allowed it to store far more music than any other player with any market penetration - while some prior models also used a hard drive and offered comparable capacity, it wasn't until the iPod came along with Apple's marketing behind it that portable digital players really started to displace portable CD players.
Remember, too, this was in 2001, well before flash had gotten as cheap and reliable as we're accustomed to today, and well before anyone was in the habit of encoding at higher quality than 128Kbps MP3 could provide - 5GB in a portable music player was huge.
Here for example, is a not very flattering account of the introduction from PC Magazine: https://web.archive.org/web/20011121170057/http:/www.interac...
The 2001 iPod cost 400$, but it was smaller than a CD player (4.02inx2.43inx0.78in) and could hold 1,000 songs. That’s point where it could start to kill off personal CD players.
“The Jukebox is historically notable for shipping with a user interface and operating system so unfriendly and bug-ridden as to inspire Björn Stenberg and other programmers to develop a superior, free and open-source replacement operating system. This project became Rockbox.[citation needed]”
Anybody know whether that (especially the “so unfriendly and bug-ridden” part; that Rockbox started on that device seems less controversial to me) is true?
Upgraded to a Zune after the battery on my Zen died. The screen and UI were great imo, sad it didn't stick around.
The click wheel UI of the iPod made its large storage actually useful rather than just being a bullet point on a box. If you had a thousand songs loaded on your iPod it was pretty easy to navigate to any album, artist, or playlist.
Most other PMPs (even after the iPod) had UIs that were basically lifted from the Walkman. Navigating HDD players was a pain in the ass.
Besides the click wheel UX the iPod had iTunes doing the heavy lifting of library management. It made editing and adding metadata to songs, which helped organize your library, very easy. That same organization completely carried over to the iPod. iTunes also supported automatically syncing an attached iPod so if you ripped a CD it appeared on your iPod after plugging it in.
Most of the competing HDD based PMPs were obsessed with just acting as mass storage devices when attached to a computer. So they had painful on-device UIs dealing with the multitude of differing naming conventions and poorly tagged files.
So while HDD players weren't invented by Apple they:
1. Made an HDD player small enough to fit in a pocket competing in dimensions with Flash based players.
2. Made a UI that allowed easy navigation of a large library.
3. Used a high speed connection that made it trivial to fill the large storage. This same connection also charged the device.
4. Had a very responsive UI not limited to the seek speed of the internal HDD. The iPod let iTunes do the hard work of creating the on device database. The iPod OS didn't need to go read metadata from every file to populate menus or display song information. It did the hard work once (in iTunes) and just used the database for everything but audio data from then on.
Apples magic is the entire packaging and intuitiveness such that every layperson can use it. But that’s not on the spec sheet…
Other than that Sony and the Zune are all that I remember seeing and that was very rare.
There’s also the ecosystem to consider. Cars, gyms, hotels all started offering ways to connect an iPod. Accessories for iPods were everywhere.
https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/4713/global-recorded-musi...
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
(for those unaware, back in 2001 Slashdot was the premier location on the internet for talking about tech. This was the summary review from the Slashdot founder, Rob Malda. It's a facinating example of how early tech adopters might understand the features, but would easilly mistake what was important in a massmarket)
Windows support followed within 9 months. Do you think it wasn't planned before launch?
There was a 4-year stretch where paid downloads were the leading source of revenue for the music industry.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billrosenblatt/2018/05/07/the-s...
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/4713/global-recorded-musi...
Apple didn’t come out with USB support for the iPod until USB 2.0 became a common feature on PCs, with it’s theoretical speed of 480 Mb/s (in my experience of real-world use it was actually still slower than FireWire 400) and sufficient power.
It was special (if only for Mac users initially). The first iPod did have a physically turning wheel (the capacitive sensing clickety one that came later didn't turn). It also had 5 GB and Firewire, and synced your entire iTunes music library (with meta data, including playlists IIRC) over onto the iPod in a few minutes. The UI, polish, and speed combined to an experience that was way ahead of all the other MP3 players around at the time.
Edit to add: Also, btw, other MP3 players at the time used AA batteries typically, and required manually copying over music. The iPod would recharge and automatically sync with your iTunes library (including contacts and calendars) every time it was plugged in.
> And while legit digital music downloads would set the stage for today's online music scene, digital purchases were never that big a chunk of the market and declined fairly quickly given streaming.
First came iTunes, then iPod, then later the iTunes Music Store. There were virtually no legit digital music downloads at the time the iPod came out. Most people's digital library came from Napster (illicitly) or (legit) ripping their own CDs (recall Apple's excellent "Rip. Mix. Burn." commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pleybGLgaEc ).
BTW, the UK launch was on 2001-11-22 at the London MacExpo in Islington, London.
https://qz.com/136239/making-itunes-available-for-windows-ch...
The iPod would have languished and died otherwise, and it certainly wouldn't have put Apple on track (and swelling with cash) to do iPhone later on.
Oh wait, that part didn't happen.
And it "declined fairly quickly given streaming" because buffet streaming services basically fucked with the economics to offer a product designed to replace recording collections while paying a fraction of the price... and fractionalizing revenue to those who create the content. Or in other words, solving piracy by merging the economic model of piracy with an updated middleman model and capturing as much value as possible in between.
Well, it kind of was. It was the only player with the click wheel interface, and the only one that supported Firewire. This gave it the advantage of being generally easy to use and was very fast and convenient to load music. It also looked pretty good (I wanted one the minute I saw it).
With the downsides being that 1. it was pretty expensive and 2. that it had an in built hard-drive that didn't really enjoy being bumped about too much (my 3rd gen died with the HDD) so you had to treat it carefully.
However they iterated pretty quickly after that, adding Windows support, USB, colour hi-res screens and massively reducing the size whilst also reducing the price. All of this allowed them to outstrip the competition so much that they were pretty soon one of the very few players left in that market.
I don’t know what was so special about the 4th generation clock wheel though…
Apple developed a category of their own, and then killed it themselves.
You're right though. I don't think anyone has any real concept of a general purpose interface for easily wearable devices that replaces a phone/tablet.
We pretty much know it's not voice. And it's not tapping on and looking at a watch. Those can work for simple and/or specialized interactions but not in the general case. Maybe AR glasses and some sort of new mode of input device? But we're certainly nowhere near that today.
The hardware/software are nowhere as slick as that old ipod. But the freedoms this device give me serve as a reminder that all of the constraints of an ipod (one per user, no library comingling, needs itunes, etc.) were artificially imposed by a hardware striving to maximize hardware sales (and placate the music industry).
> Finally, here's what drove the purchase: I was taking a long car trip, and my wife was doing the DJ work using my device. Of course, every time she wanted to change tracks I had to unlock the device with my fingerprint. Ridiculous. This little device solved that problem
Wouldn't telling her your phone's code, or temporarily adding one of her fingerprints to it for the duration of the journey, have been a much simpler solution...?
The assumption (I guess?) is that you want to keep your phone private from everyone including your spouse.
Which kind of makes sense if you think of it as an external part of your (cyber)brain, rather than a shared computing device.
Do you mean one user per iPod? (because you could obviously have many iPods per user... Apple certainly didn't object :)
But yes, you couldn't use iPods to merge iTunes libraries among friends. For that, you needed an external hard drive (and you could mount the original iPod as an external hard drive and copy the music over, but then those mp3s were seen as data, not music, and could not be played...). And once the iTunes music store got introduced, music you bought there was DRM'd, so that complicated things further.
But I don't think it was deliberately designed to "maximize hardware sales". You could easily wipe it and sync to another user in a few minutes (the original Firewire had 100 to 400 Mbit/s, so say 3 to 10 minutes to replace the entire 5 GB library, so quicker than charging it).
I'd venture that the constraints were demanded by the music industry, not imposed by Apple to maximise hardware sales (how is "needs iTunes" maximising hardware sales?).
Last I checked, you could share an iPod between multiple users via a headphone splitter. You could also use it with multiple computers/iTunes libraries if you turn off automatic syncing. iTunes also introduced DAAP playlist sharing/streaming, which was great for university networks before the rise of Spotify/Apple Music/etc..
Most hardware companies want to maximize hardware sales, but Apple unfortunately had to placate the music industry, as you note.
Which kind of paid off eventually in terms of DRM-free iTunes Plus music in 2009, but sadly it made it hard to move music off of an iPod.
I wonder if earlier editions of SoundJam/iTunes supported copying music in both directions?
It's exactly the specs I want (even has sort by genre! I couldn't find that anywhere), but most of the cheap Chinese-made ones I found online had very poor reviews.
It's an entire product category that swept in and had less than a decade of relavence before getting washed out in the tide.
Looking at the specifications, it would not be a bad device for traveling if you object to phone for privacy reasons. Really light weight.
https://tidbits.com/2020/08/17/the-case-of-the-top-secret-ip...
The ipod, perhaps more than google, was the harbinger of the downward spiral of microsoft's iron grip on the tech industry.
They're too busy selling OS licensees, Office licenses, cloud services, and running Xbox break-even.
I don’t feel like Apple Music is particularly pushy either, at least compared to Spotify. Music.app also doesn’t have its UI changing constantly for no reason, also unlike Spotify.
Here's basically what it does:
* you add your music library to it.
* what it recognises, it matches, and upgrades to 256 kbit/s AAC encoded quality.
* what it doesn't recognise, it uploads and stores.
* all of it is now available on all your devices (and you can download/delete local copies at will).
I was thinking of "upgrading" to Apple Music (as part of Apple One), and I'd hate if that functionality (specifically the uploading/syncing of "unmatched" songs) were removed!
It‘s a huge issue that you cannot add music from an iOS device though. You need to do that from a mac.
Apple’s system was genius: It could only synchronize with the system it came from, making it a peripheral of the computer, not a node in a network. This restriction lived on for the iPhone, making Apple fans curse and Android fans laugh, when a computer was required to install an iPhone, for years and years after it wasn’t technically necessary. But binding with 1 (one) computer was the agreement if Apple wanted to host music under benevolence from the labels.
Apple would have never been able to get agreements with music labels if the iPod had been open. And thus, it lived on, while all other mp3-player brands died.
It is a consequence of the music industry and an emergent property of IP laws, not a standalone decision from Apple, as opposed to making all their products closed-source, which they don’t have to.
[1] except DRM'd music, such as music purchased on the iTunes Store between its debut in 2003 and 2009.