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Comment by rmc | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't just the iPhone. Remember the Slashdot review of the iPod? "No wireless, less space than a Nomad. Lame."

I think we all remember that review, because it gets brought out any time someone criticises an Apple product at launch.

In any case, I feel like it's a little unfair to judge in hindsight like that. It had no PC compatibility, nor USB connectivity. To anyone other than a Mac user it was a dud. At the time.

A lot of the ipods were overpriced and underfeatured. They were shiny, but didn't always work as well as competitors. I once bought a video ipod - that was a mistake. And no radio? Crazy.

Apple has a long history of ditching features that power users demand and call omission "crazy", then seeing the industry ditch those same features a few years later.

Floppy drives. CD drives. Ethernet ports. Flash support.

Well power users complain because they still need to use those things. Mainstram users don't. I can remember starting my career well after the introduction of USB flash drives and still getting software on CD or even floppy if we went back a few versions. We laughed at the fact that our computers still had floppy drives even while we were loading software from a handful of the bastards.

If you buy a device that lacks flash support, and five years later everyone else finally gets around to trying to stop making things in flash, then it was a stupid idea for the device to lack flash support at the time you bought it.

Sure, a device can still be wildly successful even if its missing something important, but that doesn't magically make it a good idea at the time it was done.

The replacements for flash suffered from poor performance for a long time.

Apple's ditching Flash with essentially no downsides beyond short-lived and short-sighted marketing mockery from competitors is evidence it wasn't a "stupid idea".

Flash still suffers from poor performance to this day, let alone back then, and even on full desktop devices (hell, it'll turn on a Mac Pro's fans). Flash on phones was a miserable idea to start with.

I like how you assume that anyone who disagrees with you must just be some kind of an idiot who bases his opinions off of marketing gimmicks and the opinions of Apple's competitors.

I was basing my opinion off of my personal experiences. For years after IOS devices hit the market, flash dominated certain types of content on the web. The lack of flash support meant that a user couldn't really view these sites on an IOS device.

Also, in spite of flash's performance issues, for a long time it seemed to perform better than HTML5-based video players. Youtube's HTML5 player remained an opt-in experimental feature for so long for a reason, it simply didn't work as well as the normal player.

And yet, in this specific instance, despite the downmodders, the radio is a feature added to the iPod despite years of Apple naysaying. It is the direct opposite of what you're claiming - Apple held out against the tide, then caved.

>> "They were shiny, but didn't always work as well as competitors."

Actually the iPod had a click wheel interface that left the competition in the dust and catapulted Apple from a niche computer company for designers to a world power. Maybe you liked your Sony mp3-man better, but the rest of the world didn't care for it. That's just history.

I never looked at an iPod until at least the 4th gen, although fairly expensive compared to the competition, it had 60Gb space on the photo model. I didn't care about that much space for music, but it also doubled up as an external hard disk! I bought a 5th gen in the end, which I still own. Most of my music plays off my phone so it was not worth upgrading but I still keep it synced and the battery lasts longer than phone!

And yet Apple probably makes billions of dollars per year from the iPod and it has become almost the colloqual term for "portable digital music player". Crazy.

Not crazy; marketing.

Apple's marketing is very good, and it gets a lot of positive press (read: free positive marketing). One of their most successful plays, in my opinion, is to have become almost identified with "high-tech" consumer gadgetry. They have a target market that consists mainly of affluent people who are not only willing to spend their cash on consumer electronics, but desire to do so in a specific way that helps them identify as a "techy" or "tech geek" or what have you. Apple's target market is a set of people who are paying for a product as much because it has the Apple logo on it as because of what it does. For better or worse.

The point is it was still a huge success.

No: that product was not a success. A later product in the same product line released years later that had more benefits and fewer limitations became a huge success, but the original iPod was actually a flop that only held on to its mediocre sales due to brand loyalty, and its limited storage space and requirement to sync via a physical FireWire cable (as opposed to even USB) were in fact key to this failure.

(In particular, I will point out that the iTunes Music Store experience was what made the iPod really stand out, and that wasn't launched until 2003, in time for the 2004 release of the first truly successful iPod model, which also had a reasonable amount of storage and USB support.)

There is an awkward tendency in this space to fault people judging a specific product because they aren't taking into account that the same product line next year might actually be good, but unless users of the iPod are going to get a free upgrade next year, that's really a disingenuous way of judging new hardware.

I thought it wouldn't sell at all, but it sold quite well, made a good profit, and became a huge buzzword overnight. Yeah I think it was a success.

A huge success eventually. It kind of limped along until Apple had thrown enough money at it to make it stick (as well as making it PC compatible).

"Things really took off when Apple introduced the fourth generation(4G) iPod in July 2004. For the first time, the iPod could sync to PCs using USB instead of FireWire, a port that most PCs did not have. "

http://lowendmac.com/roundtable/11rr/011-ipod-anniversary.ht...

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