Well the popular story goes that mp3 players were a thing but either had very little flash storage, or had a big bulky hard drive and terrible battery life. Then iPod came out with a newly developed tiny hard drive, plus a flash buffer so it would only have to spin up the hd every 20 minutes, plus a good control scheme plus a fast port for transferring files plus iTunes which was supposedly better than the competing software options. Though I can't personally verify all that, since I never had an early mp3 player