The original iPod, 10 years later: a re-review | Hacker News Reader

The original iPod, 10 years later: a re-review

arstechnica.com

38 pointsjseliger30 comments

I skipped class in college to watch the iPod introduction. I first thought all Apple did was make me want an MP3 player for the first time: I asked for and got some Rio player for Christmas because it was cheaper than the iPod and really, what could the difference really be? The Rio was terrible in so many ways and the next year I got a real iPod and haven't made the same mistake again. Turned out that I didn't want an MP3 player, I wanted an iPod. Later, I didn't want a Smartphone, I wanted an iPhone.

I still have an iPod Classic to hold my whole music library and most of my audiobook collection. There's still something to be said for being able to hear any song I own at any time[1], which still requires a hard drive for me.

[1]I suppose if I signed up for iTunes Match I could do this with my iPhone today without a hard drive.

Truth is, the original iPod was not a good music player. I remember the varied competitors it had at the time. I ended up purchasing an iRiver iHP-120. That was a device that still holds its own to this day: a 20GB hard drive, MP3, WAV and Vorbis support (and it can play FLAC nowadays), USB mass storage, LCD remote control, dedicated line-out and digital line out, which, to this day, I know of no other player that has this.

Are you kidding? If anything, what you said reinforces the fact that iPod is a great music player. It had the best way to browse music library (wheel), syncing experience (playlists, play counts, etc), best interface and best industrial design, all suited for one purpose: listening to music.

Yes, but did it have useless (for a portable player) FLAC and vorbis support?

For some of us, audio quality is actually important, even in portable audio players.

Yes --to the same people that think Monster cables are better than an ordinary cable, and the same people that just don't get blind A/B tests and their results...

It's funny you mention in. Back then I participated in multiple A/B tests for LAME and other encoders and did several blind tests with all my audio playback equipment. Needless to say, the iRiver was far and away superior to the iPod in practically every metric.

I used to own a pair of Sennheiser HD-280s back then, and the difference was pretty damned clear. The AKG K-540s I own now are basically unlistenable with iPods of the time.

It required the (still) shitty iTunes software, locked you into proprietary hardware, and had limited audio playback features in comparison to its competitors (lack of on-the-fly play queues). A music player it was, but I could (and still can't) take advantage of its storage for whatever else I wanted not could I take it other people's homes and use it to share stuff.

None of those are trivial points.

I haven't heard of anyone actually caring about Ogg Vorbis support since...well, since 2001, when the iPod came out and everyone on Slashdot was up in arms about Ogg Vorbis.

Man, I thought the iPod was damn stupid when it came out, and here I am using all Apple stuff.

Lots of people are "ahead of their time" - few people can force time to move forwards the way Steve Jobs did.

The very first iPod was sort of stupid though.

Firewire only. First generation did not sync with Windows, though a later revision made it work using Music Match, which was an awful program to use.

Eventually we get a USB cable, but it cannot be used for charging, data transfer only.

It wasn't until 2003-2004 that the iPod actually became something most people could use.

That wasn't stupid. It was cunning. Record labels only signed on because the market looked to be safely relegated to Macs. Little did they know that iTunes would be ported to Windows and FireWire would be supplemented with USB.

Do you have a source for that claim? Because the store did not pop up until the same era as USB and Windows support.

Doug Morris, as quoted in Steve Knopper's book, as related in the recent Fortune magazine's special edition re: Steve Jobs, page 14:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_Morris

Jobs cleverly made his pact with the record labels when iTunes worked only on Macs, which in 2002 had a personal-computing market share in the low single digits. Apple's humble position - before iTunes became compatible with Windows, expanding its potential market share to nearly all PCs - was a virtue. This made iTunes an experiment rather than a destructive paradigm shift. "I don't understand how Apple could ruin the record business in one year on Mac," said Doug Morris, the head of Universal Music, according to Appetite for Self-Destruction, a new book about the record industry's ills by Rolling Stone writer Steve Knopper. "Why shouldn't we try this?"

This doesn't substantiate the claim that it was "cunning", i.e. a planned ruse by Apple. I can still remember the disbelief when iTunes was ported to Windows so I'll need some convincing that Steve Jobs was so ahead of the game that he started out by playing possum in order to lull the labels into a false sense of security. Was the lack of Firewire adoption also part of this masterplan+

My bad. I thought TruthElixirX was asking for a source for the bit about the record labels.

You could be right, but honestly I didn't want to take your position for fear of putting Steve on too high of a pedestal - for it would strain credulity for someone to have had his impact on six industries without the application of strategic thinking.

It would be truly god-like to have stumbled into it all via mediocrity.

Record labels didn't sign on till later. The first iPod was for playing songs you'd ripped from CDs, or found on the internet.

Record labels didn't sign on till later.

Yes, that is precisely my point.

How can this be "your point"?

Your original point was

"record labels only signed on because the market looked to be safely relegated to Macs. Little did they know that iTunes would be ported to Windows and FireWire would be supplemented with USB".

and he just told you that Record labels signed LATER when the market was no longer relegated to Mac, and USB iPods and iTunes for Windows already existed, i.e the opposite of your original point.

It can be my point because I understood ZeroGravitas to be saying that the record labels did not sign on until after the original iPod was released, which of course is correct.

Your interpretation of his post seems to be that he was claiming that the record labels didn't sign on until after a USB iPod was released, and after iTunes became available for windows. But I have too much respect for ZeroGravitas to think that he was saying something that was not historically accurate.

Wikipedia says that the iTunes store was introduced April 29, 2003, and that the 3rd-generation iPods (the first with USB) were first available on April 28, 2003. Furthermore, iTunes for Windows was announced on October 16, 2003.

So when, in this timeline, do you think labels would have signed contracts allowing Apple to distribute their music? It would be incredible to think that they put pen to paper after the store was introduced, wouldn't it?

> Firewire only.

And this is stupid because?

> First generation did not sync with Windows, though a later revision made it work using Music Match, which was an awful program to use.

First generation wasn't intended to sync with Windows. For what it did it wasn't stupid at all.

Because no one used Firewire.

And because Mac market share when the original iPod was released was very poor.

> Because no one used Firewire.

It was meant for Macs, which already had it, remember?

> And because Mac market share when the original iPod was released was very poor.

Still big enough to create a device to test waters on, and gradually enhance it. Which was kind of the point, remember?

I think it's harsh to call something stupid just because it was initially aimed at Apple's own demographic.

It is however interesting to note that the device was effectively useless for the vast majority of techies unless they switched platforms. Which makes the poor reviews a bit more understandable, they couldn't use it even if they wanted to so it's a classic case of 'sour grapes'.

And switching at that time would have involved paying over the odds for a weird looking computer with non-x86 chips and a half-finished, Frankenstein OS. So as well as the standard not wanting to change and cost reasons there were plenty of perfectly sensible reasons to not switch to a Mac. Indeed if anything, that was clearly stupid. But I did it anyway.

Actually it was so "stupid" (sic) that even though it was initially aimed at Apple's own demographic, there was demand enough for it on the Windows side for dozens of third-party integration solutions to be created...

If you had a Mac--which was the original requirement--it was far from stupid. As a penniless high school student I didn't have one, but I wanted one and it was, basically, what the iPod was always meant to be: a way to carry around your entire music collection without a huge binder of CD's.

Yes, well this is how Apple does things, constant iteration - http://www.macworld.com/article/151235/2010/05/apple_rolls.h...

maybe it used to be how apple did things, but it is most certainly not how apple does things now. look at their most recent new product line - the iPad. it was not a device that needed iterating on, as evidenced by the iPad2 being virtually the same thing.

as an iPad owner, and friend of an iPad 2 owner, i have to say, the iPad 2 is clearly better in a handful of ways. the differences are small, but over a few generations they add up to huge differences. (well, they did in other product lines anyway(

That said, the original iPad was a far sharper vision than the original iPod. it's slowly becoming a dynabook, i think.

> maybe it used to be how apple did things, but it is most certainly not how apple does things now. look at their most recent new product line - the iPad. it was not a device that needed iterating on, as evidenced by the iPad2 being virtually the same thing.

What about the iPhone? Launched as a 2G/2.5G (EDGE) only device, no copy & paste in the OS, no native third party applications, etc. Every iteration since then has added 'core' features that would be hard to live without now that we are used to them.

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