Hacker News Reader

Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

People are going to reply to you and say "what made the iPod different from the Nomad"... inarguably the iPod was hugely successful where the Nomad wasn't.

I don't think it's a great comparison. The MP3 players in the pre-iPod era were all made by tiny players no-one had heard of. The Oculus in particular has absolutely massive backing and still hasn't amounted to a lot.

I suspect the differentiator will be software, not hardware. In particular the willingness of third parties to create software. Apple has a good record there at least.

View on HN

Oculus is accessible by targeting itself as a fun gadget. You buy it to play immersive games when you're at home alone, bored. It's also affordable and that is extremely important. You won't feel nearly as bad dropping a wad of cash on this if it turns out to be a dud.

Apple's product, on the other hand, is extremely wonky. Who is this thing actually for? Based on the demos, it just looks like a second screen for my phone. It's also outrageously expensive. So Apple is asking me to seriously buy into the ecosystem and have confidence that this will be an important device in my collection.

I don't know, to me this isn't like any previous Apple take on a well defined market. In fact, this is Apple's take on a very undefined market with an unknown trajectory. It kind of feels more like when Apple went off the beaten path and added a touch bar to the MacBook Pro. It was an interesting idea and a lot of very long man hours went into making it work, but at what cost? In the end, it turns out, people just wanted simple tactile keys.

>Apple's product, on the other hand, is extremely wonky. Who is this thing actually for? Based on the demos, it just looks like a second screen for my phone. It's also outrageously expensive. So Apple is asking me to seriously buy into the ecosystem and have confidence that this will be an important device in my collection.

that's actually the playbook for new product launches for Apple. That was the same issue with Apple watch - they had no idea who it was for when they launched the first generation. It was just a watch with a screen that told time and gave you notifications. Then, they realized people loved using it for tracking health, and each generation they keep coming up with more and more ways to use it as an all-around health tracker. Now, Apple watch is as ubiquitous on people's wrists as iPhones are in people's hands

How so? The Watch was launched as a FitBit killer at the 1.0 keynote. There was a small segment from Jony Ives touting a ridiculously priced gold variant which was a complete mis-read of the market. I could see how Apple was nervous that their core audience was fashion conscious and smart watches were the domain of the biggest nerds out there.

However, point still stands, they knew they wanted an iPod shuffle with health and personal safety device at launch. They even went all out with a Nike partnership to help promote it.

I hate the touch bar. I want my function keys back.

Tiny companies nobody has heard of like Sony? Cmon.

At the time early media players were relevant, and to the community they were relevant (people very into music tech), Sony was known as "that company that installs rootkits on your computer if you buy their CD"

Sony was known as one of the big several well respected Japanese electronics manufacturers. The Sony Walkman was huge as a cassette and then CD player.

IIRC Sony were an absolute mess at the time. Didn't want to cannibalise their Minidisc sales, had weird DRM... even in the geeky crowds I ran in (where Nomads definitely were seen) Sony MP3 players were a rarity.

Agree, they were really big on the Minidisc players at this time (I had one).

My recollection is that Sony's Memory Stick based products of this era all had weird DRM requirements that were a big hassle.

cmdrtaco is wrongly mocked for his reaction to the original ipod. The original ipod flopped hard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#/media/File:Ipod_sales_pe...

It didn't catch on until several years and hardware iterations later.

It didn’t flop. It just didn’t sell as much as later versions. Apple made the market for its own product. It’s like saying the Apple II flopped because it sold way less than the current Macintoshes. Of course it did: the market was way smaller.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com