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Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

Hard to believe it has been 20 years. When talking about the impact of the original iPod on the last two decades of Apple's extraordinary success, I like to jump back to this forum thread from October 23rd 2001 (it is always easy to find because it is thread number 500!) and see the reactions from the time: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...

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During the heydays of the iPod craze, around 2005-2008, I was convinced that product line would be short lived. It was apparent that music playing was a trivial application of mobile phones, which were already becoming ubiquitous. In those days, Nokia was a far bigger cultural phenomenon outside of North America (where Nokia never gained much of a foothold). And it was truly global, not just European: even tiny villages in rural Asia, Africa and South America had Nokia vendors.

So in my straightforward projection, it was only a matter of time before the iPod would be crushed by the likes of Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Samsung, LG, etc. Never did I imagine that Apple would turn the tables on the phone manufacturers so dramatically after 2008...

Anyone with a moderately sized music collection depended entirely on iTunes to manage their library, and were hence locked in to the iPod/iTunes eco-system. There was no reasonable alternative.

Manually copying mp3 files to a Nokia or Blackberry just didn't come close to cutting it, and any attempts by those companies to compete with iTunes on the desktop ended in miserable failure due to piss-poor software quality.

And then, of course, iTunes got steadily and uniformly worse for years.

> Anyone with a moderately sized music collection depended entirely on iTunes to manage their library, and were hence locked in to the iPod/iTunes eco-system. There was no reasonable alternative.

Sorry, not true. I had a large music collection, and did not bother with iPod in the early days (and when I tried much later, didn't like scrolling wheel). It did not work with OGG Vorbis, nor could it have any moderate amount of storage. My DAP had 40 GB: iRiver H340. This was around 2003/2004.

My collection at that time ('05-ish) was mp3, ogg, & flac, ~33% each. WinAMP was still king (and still is, dammit!) and could even manage my iPod Nano without needing to install itunes bloatware.

A statement like "Anyone with a moderately sized music collection depended entirely on iTunes" is ignorant to the point where I almost feel insulted.

There were quite a few programs that synced iTunes playlists to non-Apple phones. This supports your assertion that people were dependent on iTunes for library management, but not that there was lock-in to Apple hardware. I feel that it was the seamless ease of iTunes/iPod/iPhone that won, rather than a hard moat.

I can't be the only person who downloaded mp3s from Limewire and uploaded to my iPod. I think a lot of my friends did that too. Were the majority of iPod users already locked in by that point through the iTunes ecosystem? If so, what locked them in (the song purchases)?

I always used my iPod Nano with KDE's music player/library AmaroK. I also had a Mac at that time, and purchased a lot of albums too. Since DRM was removed at that time, I either added them to my music library or copied to my iPod via my Mac.

At the end of the day, using an iPod and iTunes neither limiting nor locking-in.

> Anyone with a moderately sized music collection depended entirely on iTunes to manage their library

I had a fairly big collection and I didn't. Just used a folder structure and copied stuff over to my flash mp3 player (it was maybe 1GiB, maybe less).

I remember in people on the internet in early 2005 wishing that Apple would make an iPod phone. Both so they could combine both devices in their pockets, and because the ipod user interface was significantly superior to every single cellphone manufacture.

The the Motorola "iTunes" phone came out in September, and everyone was like "No, I wanted an ipod with cellphone support, not a regular phone with a shitty iTunes app". It seems to only make people want an ipod phone even more.

There were lots of fake "ipod phone" design concepts over the years (and a few leaked patents) until Apple finally announced theirs.

None of the fantasy concepts predicted what we got.

My favorite remains Slashdot's Editor-in-Chief CmdrTaco's "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

(shared with <3, it really shows how us geeks had/have no sense of the popularity of a tech product)

There's a post from me out there somewhere complaining about how the iPhone was a non-starter because it wasn't going to have MS Exchange support at launch, and I wasn't going to carry two devices around.

I stood in line to buy it at launch anyway, and carried two devices around.

That's a reasonable criticism if one sees 90+% of somewhat-capable portable Internet devices in the hands of business users who will all want/need exchange support, and assumes that's the market for such devices.

If, on the other hand, it creates a new market for such devices among people who couldn't tell you what MS Exchange is....

I always felt it was a good demonstration of staying disciplined and focusing on making a great consumer product first–looking too closely at the competition and building in a bunch of enterprise-friendly features from the start could have been a big distraction and resulted in a mediocre product in other ways.

When I got the first phone I saw it as the way forward for a phone UI, and I loved the iPod app. But the thing was mostly a tech demo. It was far less useful than every other smart phone on the market at the time. Slow Internet, bare bones maps, no MMS. Way too slow of a CPU for what it was trying to do.

All worked out fairly quickly once the 3GS came around.

Apple takes the Nintendo approach. Myamota/Iwata mentioned that they always try to imagine what it’s like for a non-gamer to play the game. The way they simulated that in their testing was by playing their games with their non-dominant hand (left handed). That’s what it feels like to a casual user or non-gamer. They optimize for that.

The guy that needs MS Exchange is actually a niche market (hard to believe). It’s that click wheel that brought in everybody in the world. Your mother isn’t going to figure out those Creative/Rio MP3 players from the early 2000s.

This honestly takes incredible faith in what you think is cool. I’m not good at because I usually go ‘eh, this is my thing that I’m into, and you won’t get it’. But these people don’t think like that, they go out of their way to show you why it’s cool, in whatever way possible. They are literally trying to reach people.

I hate this "your mother can't..." ageist and sexist bullshit. Maybe your mother can't. Nobody tells my mother (who is now also a grandmother) what she can and can't do.

Honestly, lots of people were able to figure those devices out. People aren't really as stupid as programmers make them out to be. But coddle them and keep beating them over the head with this and they likely just give up from being treated like shit.

It’s a manner of speaking, don’t get so woke on me now. Many people can’t figure out tech. Here comes another cliche, have you ever been the IT guy for everyone around you? Why was that? We really didn’t take User Experience seriously until about the iPhone/Apps age. That’s when people didn’t need handholding, the apps were designed well.

At best, this is ignorance. At worst, it's willful revisionism. It was the iPhone apps that drove setting HCI back almost 2 decades. Hiding functionality behind skeumorphisms, coupling file access to apps, tiny screens, reinventing the accessibility wheel. Both Apple and Microsoft had very well-regarded UI design guidelines that, if followed, made apps that afforded the same metaphors as all the other apps on the system. Then one day the tech industry decided to throw it all away in the name of graphic design and branding, not usability.

Explain all that to my mother.

Ah yes, because as we know Windows CE was the pinnacle of mobile UI design.

The firewire connection was lame.

And everyone agreed. If you look at the sales graph for the ipod it is basically a trickle until it suddenly explodes upwards.

Why the explosion? USB adaptor connection allowong it to be used on normal Windows machines.

I have an ASUS WindowsXP laptop with firewire, it worked well with an iPod.

There were a number of 'media' laptops that had "i.Link" ports (advertised that way by Sony), but you still had to buy adapter cables for it. It was a little bit of a mess but you could make it work.

I didn't have to buy anything extra, the iPod came with a 4-connector to 6-connector adapter.

I don't think it was Firewire that kept it as a niche product. It was that iTunes wasn't initially available on Windows machines, and Macs were still quite rare.

I had a G3 iMac (Graphite) at the time the iPod came out. So I got one. Actually, I got three: the first died after a day, the second was DOA, but the third kept chugging away for about 3 years until the battery died and it was only usable when plugged in.

It's funny to remember how unusual the iPod was. People on the tube in London, which isn't known for conversation amongst strangers, would ask me what it was. Tiny, about the size of a cassette case, with that that amazing white face and silver case. It was like something from the future.

They were linked, though: it was unusual to have Firewire on a PC, so even if iTunes had had Windows support at the time I don't know that it would have made much difference. It was the combination of USB and Windows support that made the difference.

Said elsewhere in this thread, but firewire/IEEE1394 wasn't hard to find in a PC/laptop, it was Windows support at all for the iPod that changed things. Once Apple shipped the Windows version of iTunes they were off and running.

I remember at the time many of laptops that had a IEEEE1394 port had the small size one, not the full-size one that the iPod cable used. Also most desktops didn't have it onboard due to royalty fees so you needed to buy a PCI card. Not an insurmountable obstacle, but enough that you had to really want one to look past that.

When iTunes for Windows became available they had already launched the 3rd generation iPod which allowed for syncing over USB unlike the prior two generations. Firewire was pretty rare on PCs in those days too. Had they stuck with firewire only I don't think it would have taken off. Would people have bought and installed a firewire card for it?

I think Firewire was a smart choice when launching to Mac users first, since USB1 was so slow, USB2 was still very new, and all new Macs had Firewire ports. That said, opening the door to Windows later on was absolutely the key to the popularity explosion, but by that time many more Windows machines also had USB2 ports for fast syncing.

This was quoted and linked in Panic's article, for what it's worth.

Derp! By the end of the article, I had forgotten that intro >_<

The one thing I had always wanted my ipod to do was stream, so I def agree with the lack of wireless being lame. Just because the greater majority of users felt it was okay and made it the most popular music device doesn't mean it wasn't lame to not have it.

Wifi's still pretty bad, but it was really bad then. Especially on consumer wifi routers, but most business set-ups sucked then, too. Dropped packets galore, signal-loss hiccups, and not enough bandwidth to make up for that by transferring large buffers really fast. Terrible for streaming. Probably way more battery-draining then than now, as well, since that kind of hardware has generally gotten a lot more efficient. Wouldn't be surprised if that efficiency has outpaced increasingly demanding standards.

[EDIT] I don't mean to be dismissive of a feature you'd have liked, I just think that, given the context of the time, I can totally understand why they'd not include that.

As soon as I got an iPhone, I remember pointing Safari at an M3U link and was so happy to have streaming on a hand held device. It took many years, but it was finally doable. I was pleasantly surprised when the stream continued flowing even once the screen locked. That was still years before music apps became a thing, but I was snug as a bug listening to my website streams on mobile.

I did a little bit of streaming on a Nokia 3650, had to go down to 40kbps if i recall correctly, but the battery life would be minutes. Then my free data loophole ended and my dream of music streaming was postponed.

I did a lot of streaming on my Sony Ericsson K800i (2006). The local public broadcaster had a deal with the mobile operators to zero-rate their streams from data plans. Using 3G UMTS you actually got better reception inside buildings/basements/on trains etc than with FM radio which would fade in and out.

I don't think 802.11b was that bad. 128kbps mp3 streaming was considered "high quality" back then, so average quality streams were within realms of bare UMTS 3G(384k down) as well as some wireless Ethernet standards at that time, 11b included.

See also HN's reaction to Dropbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Poor fella's never going to recover from this, is he?

Could be worse. Could be u/sanj who tried shutting up u/cperciva with a Putnam reference:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

(they've both been gracious about it since)

I think his take was right. The iPod was good, but iTunes was great.

The ecosystem made the iPod.

Terrible amount of storage indeed, so I did not bother with it. I went with a 40 GB iRiver H340 instead. By the time the battery was dying (2009?) I went with an iPod Touch and an iPod Classic with ~200 GB storage. I could not get used to the wheel for scrolling. Why not? Simply because I cannot aim with it, and it does (perhaps therefore?) not feel intuitive either. iPod Touch however was my first capacitive touch UI and I was sold (though again it had not much storage, hence I bought the Classic). I very much liked how Nokia was investing in Maemo (mobile touch UI Linux, largely but not completely FOSS), had various of their devices, but I knew at that point resistive touch UI would end up as a niche. They figured that out, too, with Qt and N9 but burning platform memo killed it.

It became so popular, especially after it was officially available on Windows in 2003. And it remained THE thing until the iPhone really exploded when unleashed from AT&T around 2011.

It’s heyday was only about 8 years but it had such a MASSIVE effect on the technology and music industries.

Has any other product been so important but only been around for a relatively short amount of time?

Daguerreotypes were only used for a brief period in 1840s and 1850s but had huge impact on development of photography.

Edit: check out the video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbbH77rYaa8

That’s a great example.

the iPhone really exploded when unleashed from AT&T around 2011.

Cingular.

Cingular was renamed to AT&T in 2006.

Bit more complicated than that:

https://www.att.com/Common/merger/files/pdf/Cingular_timelin...

Exactly -- during the iPhone unveiling all the demo screenshots showed "Cingular", but by the time it had been released, Cingular had been rebranded to AT&T.

I had (and still have) a launch day iPhone and it had "Cingular" on the carrier icon at the top of the screen.

Maybe the rollout timing was different in different markets.

Replying to myself as I reread the thread: I found a comment a few pages in about Apple's stock being down $1 on the day. So what if you'd skipped the iPod and just bought $399 worth of AAPL? According to this site which seems to use real data, it'd be worth... $211k today. http://stockchoker.com/?s=AAPL&d=20011023&a=399

But if everybody did that, Apple would be bankrupt because nobody was buying their products ;)

I always find it fun to think about what the biggest companies in the world will be in 10, 20, 30 years. There's a good chance that some haven't actually been founded yet, but I'm sure others are household names even now. FWIW, I think media will displace tech on the top spot and Disney will lead the pack in 2040.

It's also fun to do with future presidents.

Presidents are tricky because (recent circumstances excluded) US voters don't tend to reward people who have been in the public eye for a long time with the presidency. Looking at recent presidents, almost none were in nationally visible political offices 20+ years before their elections (though a number were famous outside of politics). The 20th/21st century presidents, and their situation 20 years before election (it would have taken a hell of an eye even identify any but Biden, Trump and Reagan):

- Biden (2000): 27th year in the US Senate

- Trump (1996): Tabloid-famous real estate developer

- Obama (1988): First year at Harvard Law School

- W. Bush (1980): Oil executive son of the VP-elect

- Clinton (1972): Arkansas Attorney General-elect

- H.W. Bush (1968): 1st-year US House Rep

- Reagan (1960): President of the Screen Actors Guild, movie star

- Carter (1956): Farmer, son of a briefly seated US House Rep

- Ford (never elected, 1954): 5th-year US House Rep

- Nixon (1948): 2-year US House Rep

- Johnson (as elected VP, 1940): 3-year US House Rep

- Kennedy (1941): US Navy Officer, son of Ambassador to the U.K.

- Eisenhower (1932): Executive officer to the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army

- Truman (1924): Former county court judge

- F.D. Roosevelt (1913): former 3-year senator, Assistant secretary of the Navy, Ex-president's cousin

- Hoover (1909): Successful mining engineer

- Coolidge (1900): City Solicitor of Northampton MA

- Harding (1900): 1st-year Ohio State Senator

- Wilson (1892): Head of the Princeton Political Science department

- Taft (1888): Judge in the Superior Court of Cincinnati, son of an ex-cabinet secretary

- T. Roosevelt (1880): New college grad, heir to a family fortune.

If you look at the set of VPs, Governors, notable Senators, and people who've previously run for president, you get a pretty good list of candidates. Sure, you'll miss odd-balls like Obama, but he was still a Senator; he just got lucky with timing and probably expected his bid for presidency to occur in like 2020-2024.

Future presidents might be someone like, Paul Ryan, AOC, Gretchen Whitmer, Chris Christie, Antony Blinken.

> If you look at the set of VPs, Governors, notable Senators, and people who've previously run for president, you get a pretty good list of candidates.

Interesting, then that of your list:

> Future presidents might be someone like, Paul Ryan, AOC, Gretchen Whitmer, Chris Christie, Antony Blinken.

3/5 are not covered by ”VPs, Governors, notable Senators, and people who've previously run for president”.

My point is that the intersection of people who become president and had been VP's, Governers, Senators or previously run for president (20 years before) in the modern era is 2 (out of the last 21 presidents). I didn't go through and look at other major candidates, but the other major candidates didn't get elected; my sense is that the losing candidates, at least recently, have been more experienced politicians (hence, "Americans don't elect people who have been in the public eye for a long time"). Trump, Obama, W. Bush, Clinton, Reagan and Carter all got elected as "outsiders" against clearly more experienced establishment politicians.

An interesting thing I noticed going through that list, though, is that a much larger number of presidents came into a more visible position (such as the ones you mentioned) by T-15 years. It seems (and in fact this somewhat mirrors other leadership-oriented career paths) that ~15 years of visibility and experience (usually preceded by a local politics, private sector, or military career to build a network) is roughly optimal for a presidential career path.

I want to add:

10 years out, that selection criteria (VP's, governors, senators, former presidential candidates) would (as far as I can tell) have missed Trump, Obama, W. Bush, Clinton (narrowly), H.W. Bush, Carter, Ford, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, F.D. Roosevelt, Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Wilson, Taft, and T. Roosevelt, so 17/21 of the people who actually became president.

To be fair to Carter, he was also a US Navy Officer in 1956 with a more distinguished career than Kennedy at 1941.

President James Earl "Jimmy" Carter graduated from the Naval Academy in 1946 with distinction, after which he was assigned to USS Wyoming (E-AG 17) as an ensign. After completing two years of surface ship duty, Carter applied for submarine duty. He served as executive officer, engineering officer, and electronics repair officer on the submarine SSK-1. When Admiral Hyman G. Rickover (then a captain) started his program to create nuclear-powered submarines, Carter wanted to join the program and was interviewed and selected by Rickover. Carter was promoted to lieutenant and from 3 November 1952 to 1 March 1953, he served on temporary duty with the Naval Reactors Branch, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Washington, D.C., to assist "in the design and development of nuclear propulsion plants for naval vessels."

From 1 March to 8 October 1953, Carter was preparing to become the engineering officer for USS Seawolf (SSN-575), one of the first submarines to operate on atomic power. However, when his father died in July 1953 Carter resigned from the Navy and returned to Georgia to manage his family interests. Carter was honorably discharged on 9 October 1953 and transferred to the retired reserve at his request with the rank of lieutenant.

https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/people/presiden...

Agreed, it perhaps doesn't represent his career up to that point. I ran into a few issues like this; his career was distinguished but he had left active duty by the time of the snapshot I was taking (I also didn't see any evidence that it had made him visible to anyone as a potential presidential candidate, which was the thesis of the comment).

I also omitted that Teddy Roosevelt was about to publish a book on the War of 1812, and that Hoover had published a widely-used textbook on mining engineering.

Ha!

“The Reality Distiortion Field is starting to warp Steve's mind if he thinks for one second that this thing is gonna take off”

From that thread: 'I'd call it the Cube 2.0 as it wont sell, and be killed off in a short time...and it's not really functional.'

Hilarious.

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