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Comment by zafiro17 | Hacker News Reader

Fond memories of my click wheel ipod, but I actually just bought a relatively generic MP3 player and am thrilled with it. Wrote about it here: https://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/360-The-MP3-Play...

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).

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From your blog:

> 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...?

Apple devices are very personal. There may be guest modes but that’s not the point, they are too multipurposed and yet artificially limited. A good generic music player is a straight forward stand alone device. Where they fail is where the content is online on some service

Sure, but the complaint was written as it being annoying having to constantly unlock it for her to have access to it, not wanting to prevent her from having access to it.

The iTunes Remote app may be handy in similar situations:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/itunes-remote/id284417350

> 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.

> 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).

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?

> constraints of an ipod (one per user)

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?).

Do you have a name or a link for that MP3 player?

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.

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