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Comment by guiambros | Hacker News Reader

From Wikipedia:

"A second generation of Microdrive was announced by IBM in June 2000 with increased capacities at 512MB and 1GB, with the 512 MB model costing $399 and the 1 GB model costing $499."

Yes, storage technology existed at the time, but it was an order of magnitude more expensive than what Apple needed to put in a consumer product.

It's unquestionable that iPod unleashed the explosive miniaturization of technology, and paved the road for everything that we saw in the following decade with smartphones.

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Those prices were still from over a year before Apple announced the iPod, in a market where technology was rapidly advancing and getting cheaper, and those were the MSRP for single unit quantities, not the bulk order prices that would have been available at launch, let alone the bulk order prices that would have been available when Apple was planning to launch their iPod.

As others have pointed out here, there were other competitors offering larger-than-1-inch hard drives like the ones Apple used.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, a portable MP3 player with about 5GB of storage was actually introduced about 2 years before the iPod.

Based on the available evidence, storage was not the defining feature that made iPod successful, which is the claim that anecdote was trying to make. The iPod was successful for other reasons, regardless of how emotionally compelling that anecdote tries to be.

> It's unquestionable that iPod unleashed the explosive miniaturization of technology, and paved the road for everything that we saw in the following decade with smartphones.

PDAs were being developed at the same time as the iPod and probably have a much better parental claim than the iPod. The first smartphones -- the ones before the iPhone -- were basically PDAs with cellular modems, and utilized the similar OSes as their non-modem-bearing predecessors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant

I had an HTC Wizard, specifically the Cingular 8100, which came out two years before the first iPhone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Wizard

Agree there were many attempts before. Heck, even General Magic created an iPhone-like experience over a decade earlier!

But none of those early predecessors achieved anything even close to the scale of the iPod.

I'm not arguing that Apple is the sole responsible for miniaturization of technology, but selling dozens of millions (and eventually hundreds of millions) of their gizmo certainly helped fast-forward the industry. Things would have happened a lot slower if it weren't for the iPod.

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