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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how big a difference this made. If I remember correctly there were iPod alternatives with similar drives pretty quickly.

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The fact that we're talking about the 'iPod' & Apple and not the 'iRiver xyz' I think shows it made a big difference.

Yes, I know, survivorship bias, but apple has a history of not releases products unless they think they're good enough (for their own definition of good) and if apple hadn't had found a way to make it store enough songs to be a differentiator we probably would never have heard of the iPod, nor would we be talking about it today

Every surviving product is a revolution by this definition.

> I think shows it made a big difference

No, it doesn't. It shows that something made a big difference, but that thing absolutely does not have to be the amount of storage.

To be more clear, I think apple wouldn't have made the iPod at all unless they got the storage where they wanted it. So maybe the amount of storage didn't matter to users in the end (anecdotally it did to me but anyway) the product probably wouldn't have existed until some other storage revolution happened.

Hah, no. It was their world class commercials. Not a single one of my twenty-something friends bought because of specs when they came out. It was these that everyone talked about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTs5pOn7XFU

At some point, great ads still need to be backed up by a good product, if the iPod was crap people wouldn't keep buying them no matter how good the ads.

That's just it, being first to the market is sometimes more important than worrying about competitors. They killed it so hard with the ipod that even if the zune was a better device at the time people wanted the ipod.

The Zune came quite a while later, though (2006 vs iPod in 2001). The main competitors at the time was Creative (Nomad) and frin 2003 (IIRC) iRiver, and they typically had slow USB ports at the time and were more bulky.

I had a Creative Nomad, which I bought around the end of 2003 and I was scoffed at by Ipod owners at how big it was.

Doing a little digging, this was the model: https://www.cnet.com/reviews/creative-nomad-jukebox-zen-xtra... 4.4 x 3 x .86" bigger than the original Sony Walkman. It had much larger capacities and was outside the Apple ecosystem, which was an absolute feature at the time. Itunes was horrid.

USB Speeds weren't that big of a factor, though YMMV depending on the user. With the larger capacities of HD based players, you loaded once, which took some time, and then topped up with new additions which was not a big deal. My particular Nomad model had USB 2.0 though

It didn’t help that the Zune was sold in a fecal shade of brown. Apparently the product designers never watched Reservoir Dogs.

people forget that the first ipod was firewire only and firewire was a very apple thing at the time. it wasn't until they gave in and changed it to usb (and released iTunes for windows) that it really set the world on fire.

When the iPod came out USB 2.0 had just been created. USB 2.0 wasn't in widespread use for at least a year or two after.

USB 1.1 was 12mbits/s -- that is 1.5MB/s. Firewire was 400mbit/s.

Accounting only for bus speed, filling up a 5GB iPod would have taken 54mins[0] for USB 1.1 vs 1.6mins[1] for Firewire 400.

[0] 1000MiB/1024MB * 5000MB = 4,883MB / 1.5MB/s = 3255s

[1] 4,883MB / (400mbit/8) = 98s

It's also worth pointing out that Firewire had the ability to charge and sync the iPod simultaneously. USB ports didn't output multiple amps like they do today, so not only did it take longer, but one would also end up with a warm iPod with even less battery life left after adding music via USB.

Apple even made dual Firewire/USB cables to allow the (Firewire) charging brick to be used while syncing.

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