>I don't get why Apple fans have this obsession with pretending Apple invents these things.
This is entirely tangential and probably a pointless gripe in this thread, but...
For some reason, it's always really annoyed me that Apple took MP3 players, called them an 'iPod' and suddenly everyone ate them up like they were the second coming of christ and we'd never had them ever before.
As someone who was There At The Time, the UX of the iPod was really, really good. There were few, if any, other companies that could match it. The vast majority of competing music players were what DankPods calls "nuggets" - i.e. barely functional e-waste that were either saddled down with horrible software (e.g. anything Sony made), had horrible controls, were bulky and painful to use, or some combination of those above dealbreakers. A lot of companies treated developing an MP3 player like any other kind of music player, and ignored the fact that these things could hold 100x as much music as anything else on the market, which necessitated a completely new UX.
To be clear, there were good non-Apple MP3 players, but they were either marketed poorly, or late arrivals (e.g. the Toshiba player that got rebadged into the Zune). By the time those existed (and tech companies started hiring UI/UX people), Apple was doing a complete reset of another product category: smartphones.
I suspect history would have been different had, say, MiniDisc hadn't failed horribly in America[0]. Pre-iPod, portable music in the US was either compact cassettes with all the downsides of tape, or CD players that could just barely fit in your pocket. The iPod was such a step up from either that it all but became a genericized trademark. Had we had a competing technology from not the 1980s, we probably wouldn't have thought the iPod was so great. Or at least, people I knew who had MiniDisc looked at the iPod like I look at all the e-waste that was trying to compete with the iPod.
[0] Yes, I know that Sony was basically trying to avoid a repeat of DAT getting banned
The iPod is the only Apple product I have ever purchased. I could easily operate the iPod without having to looking at it constantly which was great for bike rides or car rides. No fiddling and taking eyes off road.
The ipod was a very welcome step in the portable music player tech evolution at the time, but it also coincided with a bunch of people that were suddenly Very Into Music for a few years. I don't fault anyone for thinking the previous portables were just not good enough to every day carry, but they also never seemed to notice that the OG white earbuds were more painful and sounded much worse than a decent brand of $15 black earbuds. Maybe never finding good earbuds explains why they gave up on their Passion for portable music within a few years.
Have you used the previous generation of MP3 players? I had one with a tiny LCD screen that would only fit half the song title (no space for the artist). To go to then next song, you had to press the "next" button (which makes sense). Except that action would take at least 0.5s. You press next, you wait, you see the display refresh with the next song's partial song name. Not the song I want, press next again. Very quickly, to skip 10 songs takes 10 seconds of effort. It was a painful device to use.
The iPod cam with a large screen and a click wheel. I could find songs on it. That was a revolution for me.
MP3 was the enabling technology (if you can't fit many songs on a small device, then this is moot).
> MP3 was the enabling technology (if you can't fit many songs on a small device, then this is moot).
As others have eluded to, MP3 only didn't seem to be enough. I remember passing on early mp3 players because they only had 32-64mb of storage, not even really enough to store a single album. Snatching up those tiny 1.8" hard drives right away and integrating them is probably as important as the UI improvements because it solved that problem.
If I remember my first mp3 player correctly, it had 16MB onboard + a 16MB smartmedia flash card (and uploading was via PIO parallel, and the software would occupy the whole system until finished), I needed to experiment with my comfort level between low bitrate and a worthwhile amount of songs. I must have ended up around 46-64kbps.
As soon as I had the funds I quickly moved onto a variety of CD/HDD based players, although I've only recently bought (and modded) an iPod - there's definitely reasons they were so popular. I can appreciate why they went to the common platform with the phone and were later phased out entirely, but as a task-dedicated non-smart device they would be last-man-standing.
In addition to the already very thorough and well-considered comment replying to this, I just wanted to say that the iPod was one of the first MP3 players that was widely available with a full-blown hard-drive. The vast majority of MP3 players at the time had like 32-64MB of flash memory, if that (and still cost hundreds of dollars). The iPod had 5GB and 10GB models. Suddenly you could bring your entire CD collection with you anywhere. Yeah, there were a couple of competing models with similarly-sized hard drives, but the other comment covers why people spending >$400 on a fancy new gadget preferred the iPod at the time for its excellent UI/UX.
I only remember the ones about the size of a discman with 2.5" laptop hard drives. The iPod was, I think, the first one with a 1.8" HDD. When the Macbook Air first came out it used the same 1.8" HDD
That 1G of flash storage at the time was huge for a phone. This was before everybody had an iPod Touch or iPhone, of course. iPhones came out the next year but in my area hardly anyone had AT&T, so because of the exclusivity the iPod Touch became popular way before the iPhone in my area.
My mp3 player around 2001 had 700MB of removeable storage. Buying additional storage was pretty cheap too and there were standardized cases to store a lot of that format.
In addition to the points made by the sibling comment, the iPod was a quality product well executed, early competing MP3 players were not great.
Flash based players were smaller but limited in size and expansion media was expensive. Hard drive players were hobbled with USB 1.1 connections and an obsession with drag and drop for management.
The iPod by default just synched with your iTunes library. The FireWire (and eventually USB 2.0) did so quickly. The navigation was as good as the metadata which iTunes made easy to edit. The UX on the device made scrolling through long lists of songs very easy.
The iPod made using an MP3 easy and approachable for normal people. The Rio, Nomad, and a multitude of others did not. They included a bunch of checklist features but didn't focus on usability until Apple dominated the market.
This is entirely tangential and probably a pointless gripe in this thread, but...
For some reason, it's always really annoyed me that Apple took MP3 players, called them an 'iPod' and suddenly everyone ate them up like they were the second coming of christ and we'd never had them ever before.