There were also CD players that could play MP3s burned on a data disc. That bridged the "capacity gap" - 640/700 MB was a lot of MP3s at the time, especially since people used lower bitrates. Remember, the first iPod was only 5 GB.
The big problem was the interface, it really sucked to try and navigate a couple hundred MP3s on a one-line display.
> CD players that could play MP3s [...] bridged the "capacity gap"
But collecting and (forever) burning collections was a royal pain in the ass. Plus, CD readers would struggle and skip/stop/jump all the time as they bounced in your pocket or in your bag.
> The big problem was the interface
Absolutely. A lot of cheap Chinese sticks wouldn't even understand filesystem structures deeper than one level. To be fair though, the iPod Shuffle was basically like that and still sold very well; the reality distortion field was in full force at that time.
> But collecting and (forever) burning collections was a royal pain in the ass. Plus, CD readers would struggle and skip/stop/jump all the time as they bounced in your pocket or in your bag
Well, after the first generation of CD players they wised up and added high-speed drives that read into buffers ("skip-proof"/"ESP"/etc) so that skipping wasn't a big deal. Since MP3s were a smaller quantity of data, they actually worked better at this.
Ideally you wanted a player that could read CD-RWs (whether full of audio tracks or MP3 files). Still a pain in the ass but less expensive. Not all players used a laser that could read RW media. And not all media used to be readable by all drives in those days - some drives were very very sensitive. I remember the horror of desperately searching DVDR-Help.com to try and find media with good compatibility ratings.
The thing that always amused me as a kid was how indestructable my Sony Discman CD player was. I went through probably 4 or 5 off-brand CD and MP3-CD players that had skip-proof before I finally switched to MP3 players. Every time they'd conk out after a year or two and I'd have to fall back to that stupid skip-prone Discman. The thing was built like a tank and I wouldn't be surprised if it still worked today, 20 years later. When I replaced it with an early iRiver HDD player in 2003 I shelled out like two years of savings for it, and that iRiver ended up lasting a decade. It was an important lesson for young me: you get what you pay for.
> Absolutely. A lot of cheap Chinese sticks wouldn't even understand filesystem structures deeper than one level.
That too, but I was really thinking about the scroll-wheel there. I can still remember the interminable pain of scrolling through a giant list of albums at about 2 per second. The iPod scroll wheel and the Zen Vision M's touch-strip were massive improvements for how they let you scroll rapidly but also have fine control.
The iRiver fixed it with firmware brute-forcing (in Rockbox). All you had was a D-pad but it would scroll exponentially faster the longer you held it down, so you could actually get where you wanted to go in a reasonable amount of time. Not elegant but it worked.
I remember hearing that Phil Schiller came up with that idea.
Apple really wouldn't be Apple without him. He's the guy who had the goal of making a laptop with one port. He's the guy who's on board with removing the headphone jack. He's the guy making decisions that piss a lot of people off but understands what makes their products uniquely Apple.
Any company can add a bunch of ports and say "yes" to everything. It's characteristic of Apple to piss people off in the short term and keep things focused.
Personally I wish the MacBook had 2 ports, but I love that Phil's philosophy is "what if we made a notebook with just one port?"
Me too, but I have come to appreciate the whole product experience. I went from the MacBook Air 13" to a MacBook 12". I cycle to work nearly daily and take my MacBook in my backpack. Yesterday I had to connect my wife's MacBook Air 13" and then I realized that I forgot how heavy it is.
If you need a laptop that is so light and thin, something's got to give. If removing a few ports and a CPU fan brings you there, it's like it is.
(Before someone says that you have the extra weight of an USB-C to display/USB-A adapter: the MacBook 12" charger is also smaller and lighter than the MacBook Air charger.)
Plus you can charge the Macbook from any* 2.4A USB charger with appropriate cable - and since I'm already carrying two of those for the iPad and iPhone, there's no need to carry the USB-C brick as well.
* I've had issues with some of the cheaper ones I've tried.
Yes, but it's the 4G and successors that AFAIK had the selector that was dubbed the "Click Wheel." Previous models had a mechanical scroll wheel that looked somewhat similar and which incrementally added touch functions but when people talk about the click wheel they're normally referring to the tap sensors in the iPod Mini & the 4G and followons.
You obviously never used one. It gave you full, immediate control over how fast you scrolled, which buttons could never do. It enabled you to immediately change direction without lifting your finger. You could start by placing your finger anywhere on the wheel, which made it easy to use in the dark, and moving your finger from the wheel to the button in the center was just as easy.
It was, and still is, the best interface I've ever used for navigating through large, grouped lists.
You could also adjust the volume through your pants, at least with some versions. It was just sensitive enough that I could do this with jeans without having to stick my hand in my pocket. Honestly this was one of my favorite features, at least until the headphone remotes.
That is exactly why Apple cleaned up and previous players didn't.
From a technical point, that is correct. From a usability point, it isn't - because it took a previously digital control (button pressed or not) and made it feel analog (just turn the wheel).
And it's much easier to precisely navigate over large distances with an analog(-feeling) control.
Of course it wasn't only the wheel that made a difference, but it was the mindset behind it: Take things that to most engineers are functionally equivalent and choose the one that makes it easier for the user. Or find something that makes it easier for the user.
That is a lesson that many of the products of our industry are still missing. What matters is not only functionality, but how easily and intuitively I as a user can access that functionality.
Not only still missing, but largely extinct. Analog displays had two brightness/contrast dials (or knobs? can't find a word), and you just rotated it until done. Now I have to use crappy OSD menu with 4 plus/minus/up/down/enter/exit/auto/mode/etc dynamic buttons each time I need to adjust these. Some manufacturers' ui designers are even so dumb that put unobvious logic into it like when you first press minus, it adjusts contrast, and when plus, it is brightness. HOW could that happen to the industry?
Because it was tactile, and allowed for you to spin at higher and lower speeds. Good luck pressing a button with any velocity at all, and I've never seen the "press and hold for higher speeds" thing done half as well. Not to mention that it completely lacks in terms of feedback.
The smartest thing they did with the click wheel after the wheel itself was the little clicking noise they played as you spun it. It made it feel mechanical, and gave you immediate feedback about how fast you were going.
My first MP3 player was solid state and cheap, but it only had 32MB of storage. I would put 5 or 6 songs on it in the morning and listen to them on my way to work. I think a lot of my music back then was from Napster, and I intentionally sought out low-bit rate files. The iPod seemed fantastically expensive.
Creative had an mp3 player that was shaped like a portable CD player [1]. I guess the idea was that it was a form factor that people were already comfortable with. If you're looking for a reason why Apple ended up on top of the portable mp3 market, this example always seemed to sum it up for me. Apple has its faults, but (with reference to the fake Henry Ford quote) it's never been the sort of company that sold its customers faster horses.
Ooh, I had one of those in high school, saved up for months! I loved that thing - lots of space, it read song info from the files, supported playlists and had space for dozens of albums! DOZENS! Admittedly it ate 4 AA batteries in as many hours, but who cares? It was just as big as a discman, but SO MUCH MORE AWESOME. Used it every day on the school bus.
I kinda wanted an iPod when they came out, but as I grew up in a strict Dos & Windows home, that was out of the question.
They must have offered a few versions of the Nomad, cuz mine was crap. And oh dear $deity, the software for loading it up from Windows had a terrible UI, no flexibility in organizing songs...
The bundled software was always crappy. Luckily the protocol was simple and people reverse engineered it quickly. I used some linux command line tool to manage files on it.
The Nomad was pretty much just a rebranded Samsung Yepp YP-D40.
It had 64MB of flash storage and a parallel port connector compared to the 5GB and Firewire 400 that the iPod had, the Nomad/Yepp YP-D40 was fairly decent compared to a lot of the crap that was out there, but it didn't deserve a premium price.
Perhaps you should compare the iPod to the Nomad Jukebox line from around the iPod's release, instead of the Nomad 1 from the 90's.
Jukebox 1 had 6GB storage, USB 1.1, and came out nearly a year before iPod 1. Jukebox 2 came out the following year, had 30GB storage, and used USB 2.0.
The big problem was the interface, it really sucked to try and navigate a couple hundred MP3s on a one-line display.