Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I'm tempted to say that this story uses hindsight to maybe give Apple at least a bit too much credit. When the iPod first came out it wasn't anything obviously special. The famous clicky wheel didn't come until I think the 4th generation and I believe iTunes was originally Mac only. And Macs were pretty fringe at the time.

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.

View on HN

> When the iPod first came out it wasn't anything obviously special.

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.

> When the iPod first came out it wasn't anything obviously special.

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.

The Archos Jukebox 6000 had 6GB HDD as a portable mp3 player one year earlier than the iPod.

Yes, but nobody ever heard of it until it was mentioned as an also-ran in Wikipedia's article about DAPs. (That said, I did just finish updating my prior comment to reflect that the iPod wasn't the first HDD-based player to market, but I think it is still fair to say it was the first one that mattered.)

Even if they weren't nearly as ubiquitous as they would become, people absolutely had heard of DAPs before the iPod came out. And, like the iPhone, it took 2 or 3 generations before it was obvious to a lot of people that this was something different--in part because of the ecosystem.

Here for example, is a not very flattering account of the introduction from PC Magazine: https://web.archive.org/web/20011121170057/http:/www.interac...

Kids had MP3 players before the iPod. I remember them in high school and yes they were a known music player alternative to CDs. The iPod landed with a unified marketing campaign that promoted itself as a music device vs an MP3 player. The marketing campaign was sleek and different.

Before the iPod, a DAP was an alternative to a Discman. After, it was the other way around - at first for rich kids whose families could afford the requisite Macs for iTunes, but once iTunes for Windows came out, a Discman was what you had if you were poor.

But those flash based MP3 players didn't have much storage (certainly not several GB), and typically had a terrible UI, if they could handle meta data (song, artist, album, genre) at all.

The Archie Jukebox 6000 was freaking huge because it used a laptop sized HDD. It was portable much like a boom box was portable, but at the size of a CD player and a small stack of CD’s it wasn’t clearly better.

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.

Exactly, the Archie Jukebox didn't fit into a jeans pocket. There were MP3 players that did fit into a jeans pocket, but they used flash, which at the time only had the capacity for a few CDs at most. So, it was the iPod with which you could carry your entire music library (or a good chunk of it, nearly 100 CDs) in your pocket.

Wikipedia also claims (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series):

“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?

The Creative NOMAD Jukebox was released in 2000 and had a 6GB hard drive.

The NOMAD used a large laptop drive that wasn't pocketable and used a lot of power. Apple bought exclusive music player rights to Toshiba's tiny drive giving them a temporary monopoly.

You could take it apart though which was nice. When mine was on it's last legs, hard-drive clicking to death, I swapped in a cheap 250gb laptop drive and could finally carry all of my music library around instead of having to pick and choose.

Upgraded to a Zune after the battery on my Zen died. The screen and UI were great imo, sad it didn't stick around.

It was fucking huge and was USB 1.1 so it took forever to load music on it. The originals iPod was much smaller (using a microdrive) and only supported FireWire. It could load music as fast as the drive could write.

And that is unrelated to the point that the iPod was a clone of existing tech. You might have liked it more, but that doesn't change the arrow of time.

The iPod as a clone of existing technology is uncharitable to the point of being foolish about it. Like so many successful products implementation is more important than a bill of materials.

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.

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

Exactly. The same argument gets peddled out against any Apple product. There was a capacitive touch screen phone before the iPhone. There were app stores before the iPhone’s. There were music players with X before the iPad. Rinse and repeat.

Apples magic is the entire packaging and intuitiveness such that every layperson can use it. But that’s not on the spec sheet…

Apples magic is their advertising. They could sell shit to a horse.

And just for some context. I had a Rio MP3 flash player that came with 32mb of storage around that time. mb, not gb. Like 10 songs of space. I bought a 64mb card with it that cost more than the player did and setup some sort of thing with smart playlists in iTunes to create a playlist of 64mb of music from stuff I hadn't played recently so it could copy over with as little wasted space as possible.

> When the iPod first came out it wasn't anything obviously special.

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)

While true, Apple also iterated (and took advantage of higher capacity disk drives). It took until the 4th generation to get the iconic version of the click wheel. It also took some time for Apple to offer iTunes on Windows. So while some of us could have been more forward looking at the time, it wasn't obviously a world-changing product out of the gate.

The iPod's wheel was distinctive immediately. The click wheel was just a refinement.

Windows support followed within 9 months. Do you think it wasn't planned before launch?

I thought the 1st generation had the best click wheel.

So what I'm getting from this thread is there are no reasons why the iPod would become successful, would go on to dominate the portable music player market and reconcile the music publishers with digital downloads. In fact, it seems most likely that those things didn't happen at all, and if they did it was because of Apple's magic marketing which is cheating, rather than real reasons.

In fact it’s amazing anyone at all bought one, considering its software wasn’t written in Rust.

The first iPod had the wheel, which was the revelation. The later clickwheel was just an iteration. And the iPod had FireWire, which meant you didn’t have to wait all day to move your music over USB.

Sometimes I forget how painfully slow usb 1.x was! I had an external drive and copying a few cds worth of music would take hours.

USB 1.1 moved data at 12 Mb/s and carried insufficient power to charge an iPod. Whereas FireWire shifted data at 400 Mb/s. That difference was huge.

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.

FireWire also charged it while you were loading music. You plugged it in, stuff got loaded, and the battery topped off. You didn't burn through the battery while it took an hour to load an album like USB 1.1 players.

Digital sales out-revenued streaming until sometime 2014ish, and there was a window in which that happened while it also beat out physical formats.

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.

I can hardly recall anyone having an MP3 player that wasn’t an iPod when I was young.

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.

If you remember the Zune you're talking about a later period. The Zune wasn't introduced until 2006, just before the iPhone. The other MP3 players people are talking about here were early 2000s.

Yes, but iPods were popular well after the first iPhone because many people and especially young people couldn’t afford them and they had limited carrier availability. Also MP3 players in the early years were hardly common before the iPod that I can remember.

iTunes for Windows is what made Apple a trillion dollar company.

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.

Remember when they made iMessage for Android and WhatsApp never happened?

Oh wait, that part didn't happen.

WhatsApp was around before iMessage, so it being available on Android wouldn't have prevented WhatsApp. BBM on other platforms might have.

>I'm tempted to say that this story uses hindsight to maybe give Apple at least a bit too much credit. >When the iPod first came out it wasn't anything obviously special.

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.

The very first iPod had a clickwheel. It took a few generations before it was touch sensitive instead of a physically rotating wheel.

Am I the only one who considered the touch wheel a regression? I really liked my iPod with physical clicky spinning wheel

No, it was a common complaint at the time when the touch wheel was introduced. They became a lot more ubiquitous after the touch wheel introduction though, but I don't think that was directly related...

The spinning wheel also had some inertia, which was really neat. You could give it a good spin and it would slowly "roll out". I think they tried to emulate that with the round capacitive touch thingy ("click wheel"), but that wasn't quite as nice. I guess it was more dust/dirt/water resistant, though.

Click wheel was Apple's term for the touch sensitive wheel with integrated buttons. But reviews praised the iPod's interface before the click wheel.

The first two generations had a ring of buttons around the wheel rather than a touchwheel; menu at the top, play/pause at the bottom and skip backwards and forwards on the left and right. The third gen moved these buttons to between the wheel and the screen. Fourth was clicky wheel, I believe.

> iTunes was originally Mac only

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.

[1] https://500ish.com/a-time-to-kill-itunes-2d9a24529b9a

There were decidedly better programs than iTunes for Windows PCs. At the time, I was very into curating the genres etc. of my music collection and used a program called J River Media Center or something like that. I only stopped using it when Apple essentially made it impossible for 3rd party programs to be fully functional.

Your link puts the quote "It's like giving somebody a glass of ice water in hell", which makes far more sense.

And WMP was awful, and got more awful each time. Winamp on the other hand was great, it really kicked the llama's ass.

whips, not kicked

Hey it's been 20 years, at least it wasn't "licked" :D

I mean, was Windows Media Player really that bad?

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…

WMP was terrible as a music player. That’s why Winamp and Foobar exist.

> digital purchases were never that big a chunk of the market

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...

I guess it depends on the source of the numbers. Eyeballing this chart [1] it doesn't look as if downloads were ever the majority. (In any case, they weren't for long.)

[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/4713/global-recorded-musi...

If you are including YouTube streaming then yes ad revenue from this wasn’t that late to the game, but Spotify and pandora took over a decade to grow any meaningful market share.

https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/4713/global-recorded-musi...

I wasn’t a Mac user back then, but when the original iPod was revealed, I was blown away by its looks, and it was something we talked about at the office.

I don’t know what was so special about the 4th generation clock wheel though…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com