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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Important to note here that Dan has been for years asking people to understand this comment in the context of the time and circumstances it was written. It's not a dunk on Dropbox. It's not the "less space than a Nomad" iPod comment on Slashdot. It was helpful and constructive criticism for Houston's YC application --- very specifically the application itself.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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The "viral" point was a good one, and which they solved quite cleverly: as a student I got 10 GB for free, but additional 10 GB for each recruited person. Everyone at campus was on a recruiting spree for a while, to bulk up free storage.

Of course, that doesn't make them money. But millions of users that then had all their files there and kept using it when no longer students (so paying), and recommended it to their places of work etc.

> "less space than a Nomad"

I actually thought that was a valid comment, more so than the Dropbox one. The contemporaneous iPod _was_ technically and acoustically inferior to the Nomad.

The iPod "won" on account of fashion, style and marketing. Yes, the Slashdot comment was naive in underestimating or ignoring the power of Apple, but objectively it wasn't wrong. Apple released an inferior product and used out-of-band techniques to sell it.

It's a category error to compare the two comments at all.

You literally compared them in your comment.

Yes, by pointing out that they are not similar conceptually.

TBF, iPod design was very neat and the nano's were very thin for the time.

> The contemporaneous iPod _was_ technically and acoustically inferior to the Nomad.

You're cherry-picking your "technicals". The click wheel hardware and software implementation (especially the UI response time) was (and still is) revolutionary.

iPod won on the technical merits; just not the ones you're focusing.

The anti-Apple crowd on here loves to crow about how Apple only wins on marketing. Look I find the ads cringe as fuck too, but let's not pretend that the hardware isn't much, much better than average.

Better than all? No certainly not, Apple's build quality loses out to plenty of much more premium products. But it generally sits head and shoulders above the average build quality of any given product category, which seems to be the niche they most aim for: "the upmarket version of the common offering." That ones that immediately come to mind are Macbooks and iPads.

The thing with Apple products is that they may not be the best at every single spec but they usually have the best overall package.

You can find a laptop that is better in one aspect, but it will be worse in others.

You have to mention the music store. Prior to that, there were few legal ways to get music to put onto the devices.

The first Bitcoin thread is great

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=599852

The lesson I learn repeatedly on the internet is that most people don’t have a single clue what they are talking about.

There is probably something here about human psychology where we underestimate the switching costs of things we have already, and are wired to look at things through the lens of the world we have now.

Absolutely no-one is concerned today about what happens when you dip out of connectivity because fast mobile connectivity was not abundant in 2007 (the iPhone was only released that year), which obviates the "this will never replace a USB" criticism. Mobile made a whole new class of businesses possible.

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