Hard to believe it has been 20 years. When talking about the impact of the original iPod on the last two decades of Apple's extraordinary success, I like to jump back to this forum thread from October 23rd 2001 (it is always easy to find because it is thread number 500!) and see the reactions from the time: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...
During the heydays of the iPod craze, around 2005-2008, I was convinced that product line would be short lived. It was apparent that music playing was a trivial application of mobile phones, which were already becoming ubiquitous. In those days, Nokia was a far bigger cultural phenomenon outside of North America (where Nokia never gained much of a foothold). And it was truly global, not just European: even tiny villages in rural Asia, Africa and South America had Nokia vendors.
So in my straightforward projection, it was only a matter of time before the iPod would be crushed by the likes of Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Samsung, LG, etc. Never did I imagine that Apple would turn the tables on the phone manufacturers so dramatically after 2008...
I remember in people on the internet in early 2005 wishing that Apple would make an iPod phone. Both so they could combine both devices in their pockets, and because the ipod user interface was significantly superior to every single cellphone manufacture.
The the Motorola "iTunes" phone came out in September, and everyone was like "No, I wanted an ipod with cellphone support, not a regular phone with a shitty iTunes app". It seems to only make people want an ipod phone even more.
There were lots of fake "ipod phone" design concepts over the years (and a few leaked patents) until Apple finally announced theirs.
None of the fantasy concepts predicted what we got.
Anyone with a moderately sized music collection depended entirely on iTunes to manage their library, and were hence locked in to the iPod/iTunes eco-system. There was no reasonable alternative.
Manually copying mp3 files to a Nokia or Blackberry just didn't come close to cutting it, and any attempts by those companies to compete with iTunes on the desktop ended in miserable failure due to piss-poor software quality.
> Anyone with a moderately sized music collection depended entirely on iTunes to manage their library, and were hence locked in to the iPod/iTunes eco-system. There was no reasonable alternative.
Sorry, not true. I had a large music collection, and did not bother with iPod in the early days (and when I tried much later, didn't like scrolling wheel). It did not work with OGG Vorbis, nor could it have any moderate amount of storage. My DAP had 40 GB: iRiver H340. This was around 2003/2004.
My collection at that time ('05-ish) was mp3, ogg, & flac, ~33% each. WinAMP was still king (and still is, dammit!) and could even manage my iPod Nano without needing to install itunes bloatware.
A statement like "Anyone with a moderately sized music collection depended entirely on iTunes" is ignorant to the point where I almost feel insulted.
I can't be the only person who downloaded mp3s from Limewire and uploaded to my iPod. I think a lot of my friends did that too. Were the majority of iPod users already locked in by that point through the iTunes ecosystem? If so, what locked them in (the song purchases)?
I always used my iPod Nano with KDE's music player/library AmaroK. I also had a Mac at that time, and purchased a lot of albums too. Since DRM was removed at that time, I either added them to my music library or copied to my iPod via my Mac.
At the end of the day, using an iPod and iTunes neither limiting nor locking-in.
There were quite a few programs that synced iTunes playlists to non-Apple phones. This supports your assertion that people were dependent on iTunes for library management, but not that there was lock-in to Apple hardware. I feel that it was the seamless ease of iTunes/iPod/iPhone that won, rather than a hard moat.
There's a post from me out there somewhere complaining about how the iPhone was a non-starter because it wasn't going to have MS Exchange support at launch, and I wasn't going to carry two devices around.
I stood in line to buy it at launch anyway, and carried two devices around.
That's a reasonable criticism if one sees 90+% of somewhat-capable portable Internet devices in the hands of business users who will all want/need exchange support, and assumes that's the market for such devices.
If, on the other hand, it creates a new market for such devices among people who couldn't tell you what MS Exchange is....
I always felt it was a good demonstration of staying disciplined and focusing on making a great consumer product first–looking too closely at the competition and building in a bunch of enterprise-friendly features from the start could have been a big distraction and resulted in a mediocre product in other ways.
Apple takes the Nintendo approach. Myamota/Iwata mentioned that they always try to imagine what it’s like for a non-gamer to play the game. The way they simulated that in their testing was by playing their games with their non-dominant hand (left handed). That’s what it feels like to a casual user or non-gamer. They optimize for that.
The guy that needs MS Exchange is actually a niche market (hard to believe). It’s that click wheel that brought in everybody in the world. Your mother isn’t going to figure out those Creative/Rio MP3 players from the early 2000s.
This honestly takes incredible faith in what you think is cool. I’m not good at because I usually go ‘eh, this is my thing that I’m into, and you won’t get it’. But these people don’t think like that, they go out of their way to show you why it’s cool, in whatever way possible. They are literally trying to reach people.
I hate this "your mother can't..." ageist and sexist bullshit. Maybe your mother can't. Nobody tells my mother (who is now also a grandmother) what she can and can't do.
Honestly, lots of people were able to figure those devices out. People aren't really as stupid as programmers make them out to be. But coddle them and keep beating them over the head with this and they likely just give up from being treated like shit.
It’s a manner of speaking, don’t get so woke on me now. Many people can’t figure out tech. Here comes another cliche, have you ever been the IT guy for everyone around you? Why was that? We really didn’t take User Experience seriously until about the iPhone/Apps age. That’s when people didn’t need handholding, the apps were designed well.
At best, this is ignorance. At worst, it's willful revisionism. It was the iPhone apps that drove setting HCI back almost 2 decades. Hiding functionality behind skeumorphisms, coupling file access to apps, tiny screens, reinventing the accessibility wheel. Both Apple and Microsoft had very well-regarded UI design guidelines that, if followed, made apps that afforded the same metaphors as all the other apps on the system. Then one day the tech industry decided to throw it all away in the name of graphic design and branding, not usability.
When I got the first phone I saw it as the way forward for a phone UI, and I loved the iPod app. But the thing was mostly a tech demo. It was far less useful than every other smart phone on the market at the time. Slow Internet, bare bones maps, no MMS. Way too slow of a CPU for what it was trying to do.
All worked out fairly quickly once the 3GS came around.
I don't think it was Firewire that kept it as a niche product. It was that iTunes wasn't initially available on Windows machines, and Macs were still quite rare.
I had a G3 iMac (Graphite) at the time the iPod came out. So I got one. Actually, I got three: the first died after a day, the second was DOA, but the third kept chugging away for about 3 years until the battery died and it was only usable when plugged in.
It's funny to remember how unusual the iPod was. People on the tube in London, which isn't known for conversation amongst strangers, would ask me what it was. Tiny, about the size of a cassette case, with that that amazing white face and silver case. It was like something from the future.
They were linked, though: it was unusual to have Firewire on a PC, so even if iTunes had had Windows support at the time I don't know that it would have made much difference. It was the combination of USB and Windows support that made the difference.
Said elsewhere in this thread, but firewire/IEEE1394 wasn't hard to find in a PC/laptop, it was Windows support at all for the iPod that changed things. Once Apple shipped the Windows version of iTunes they were off and running.
I remember at the time many of laptops that had a IEEEE1394 port had the small size one, not the full-size one that the iPod cable used. Also most desktops didn't have it onboard due to royalty fees so you needed to buy a PCI card. Not an insurmountable obstacle, but enough that you had to really want one to look past that.
When iTunes for Windows became available they had already launched the 3rd generation iPod which allowed for syncing over USB unlike the prior two generations. Firewire was pretty rare on PCs in those days too. Had they stuck with firewire only I don't think it would have taken off. Would people have bought and installed a firewire card for it?
I think Firewire was a smart choice when launching to Mac users first, since USB1 was so slow, USB2 was still very new, and all new Macs had Firewire ports. That said, opening the door to Windows later on was absolutely the key to the popularity explosion, but by that time many more Windows machines also had USB2 ports for fast syncing.
There were a number of 'media' laptops that had "i.Link" ports (advertised that way by Sony), but you still had to buy adapter cables for it. It was a little bit of a mess but you could make it work.
Terrible amount of storage indeed, so I did not bother with it. I went with a 40 GB iRiver H340 instead. By the time the battery was dying (2009?) I went with an iPod Touch and an iPod Classic with ~200 GB storage. I could not get used to the wheel for scrolling. Why not? Simply because I cannot aim with it, and it does (perhaps therefore?) not feel intuitive either. iPod Touch however was my first capacitive touch UI and I was sold (though again it had not much storage, hence I bought the Classic). I very much liked how Nokia was investing in Maemo (mobile touch UI Linux, largely but not completely FOSS), had various of their devices, but I knew at that point resistive touch UI would end up as a niche. They figured that out, too, with Qt and N9 but burning platform memo killed it.
The one thing I had always wanted my ipod to do was stream, so I def agree with the lack of wireless being lame. Just because the greater majority of users felt it was okay and made it the most popular music device doesn't mean it wasn't lame to not have it.
Wifi's still pretty bad, but it was really bad then. Especially on consumer wifi routers, but most business set-ups sucked then, too. Dropped packets galore, signal-loss hiccups, and not enough bandwidth to make up for that by transferring large buffers really fast. Terrible for streaming. Probably way more battery-draining then than now, as well, since that kind of hardware has generally gotten a lot more efficient. Wouldn't be surprised if that efficiency has outpaced increasingly demanding standards.
[EDIT] I don't mean to be dismissive of a feature you'd have liked, I just think that, given the context of the time, I can totally understand why they'd not include that.
As soon as I got an iPhone, I remember pointing Safari at an M3U link and was so happy to have streaming on a hand held device. It took many years, but it was finally doable. I was pleasantly surprised when the stream continued flowing even once the screen locked. That was still years before music apps became a thing, but I was snug as a bug listening to my website streams on mobile.
I did a little bit of streaming on a Nokia 3650, had to go down to 40kbps if i recall correctly, but the battery life would be minutes. Then my free data loophole ended and my dream of music streaming was postponed.
I did a lot of streaming on my Sony Ericsson K800i (2006). The local public broadcaster had a deal with the mobile operators to zero-rate their streams from data plans. Using 3G UMTS you actually got better reception inside buildings/basements/on trains etc than with FM radio which would fade in and out.
I don't think 802.11b was that bad. 128kbps mp3 streaming was considered "high quality" back then, so average quality streams were within realms of bare UMTS 3G(384k down) as well as some wireless Ethernet standards at that time, 11b included.
It became so popular, especially after it was officially available on Windows in 2003. And it remained THE thing until the iPhone really exploded when unleashed from AT&T around 2011.
It’s heyday was only about 8 years but it had such a MASSIVE effect on the technology and music industries.
Has any other product been so important but only been around for a relatively short amount of time?
Exactly -- during the iPhone unveiling all the demo screenshots showed "Cingular", but by the time it had been released, Cingular had been rebranded to AT&T.
Replying to myself as I reread the thread: I found a comment a few pages in about Apple's stock being down $1 on the day. So what if you'd skipped the iPod and just bought $399 worth of AAPL? According to this site which seems to use real data, it'd be worth... $211k today. http://stockchoker.com/?s=AAPL&d=20011023&a=399
I always find it fun to think about what the biggest companies in the world will be in 10, 20, 30 years. There's a good chance that some haven't actually been founded yet, but I'm sure others are household names even now. FWIW, I think media will displace tech on the top spot and Disney will lead the pack in 2040.
Presidents are tricky because (recent circumstances excluded) US voters don't tend to reward people who have been in the public eye for a long time with the presidency. Looking at recent presidents, almost none were in nationally visible political offices 20+ years before their elections (though a number were famous outside of politics). The 20th/21st century presidents, and their situation 20 years before election (it would have taken a hell of an eye even identify any but Biden, Trump and Reagan):
- Biden (2000): 27th year in the US Senate
- Trump (1996): Tabloid-famous real estate developer
- Obama (1988): First year at Harvard Law School
- W. Bush (1980): Oil executive son of the VP-elect
- Clinton (1972): Arkansas Attorney General-elect
- H.W. Bush (1968): 1st-year US House Rep
- Reagan (1960): President of the Screen Actors Guild, movie star
- Carter (1956): Farmer, son of a briefly seated US House Rep
- Ford (never elected, 1954): 5th-year US House Rep
- Nixon (1948): 2-year US House Rep
- Johnson (as elected VP, 1940): 3-year US House Rep
- Kennedy (1941): US Navy Officer, son of Ambassador to the U.K.
- Eisenhower (1932): Executive officer to the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army
- Truman (1924): Former county court judge
- F.D. Roosevelt (1913): former 3-year senator, Assistant secretary of the Navy, Ex-president's cousin
- Hoover (1909): Successful mining engineer
- Coolidge (1900): City Solicitor of Northampton MA
- Harding (1900): 1st-year Ohio State Senator
- Wilson (1892): Head of the Princeton Political Science department
- Taft (1888): Judge in the Superior Court of Cincinnati, son of an ex-cabinet secretary
- T. Roosevelt (1880): New college grad, heir to a family fortune.
To be fair to Carter, he was also a US Navy Officer in 1956 with a more distinguished career than Kennedy at 1941.
President James Earl "Jimmy" Carter graduated from the Naval Academy in 1946 with distinction, after which he was assigned to USS Wyoming (E-AG 17) as an ensign. After completing two years of surface ship duty, Carter applied for submarine duty. He served as executive officer, engineering officer, and electronics repair officer on the submarine SSK-1. When Admiral Hyman G. Rickover (then a captain) started his program to create nuclear-powered submarines, Carter wanted to join the program and was interviewed and selected by Rickover. Carter was promoted to lieutenant and from 3 November 1952 to 1 March 1953, he served on temporary duty with the Naval Reactors Branch, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Washington, D.C., to assist "in the design and development of nuclear propulsion plants for naval vessels."
From 1 March to 8 October 1953, Carter was preparing to become the engineering officer for USS Seawolf (SSN-575), one of the first submarines to operate on atomic power. However, when his father died in July 1953 Carter resigned from the Navy and returned to Georgia to manage his family interests. Carter was honorably discharged on 9 October 1953 and transferred to the retired reserve at his request with the rank of lieutenant.
Agreed, it perhaps doesn't represent his career up to that point. I ran into a few issues like this; his career was distinguished but he had left active duty by the time of the snapshot I was taking (I also didn't see any evidence that it had made him visible to anyone as a potential presidential candidate, which was the thesis of the comment).
I also omitted that Teddy Roosevelt was about to publish a book on the War of 1812, and that Hoover had published a widely-used textbook on mining engineering.
If you look at the set of VPs, Governors, notable Senators, and people who've previously run for president, you get a pretty good list of candidates. Sure, you'll miss odd-balls like Obama, but he was still a Senator; he just got lucky with timing and probably expected his bid for presidency to occur in like 2020-2024.
Future presidents might be someone like, Paul Ryan, AOC, Gretchen Whitmer, Chris Christie, Antony Blinken.
> If you look at the set of VPs, Governors, notable Senators, and people who've previously run for president, you get a pretty good list of candidates.
Interesting, then that of your list:
> Future presidents might be someone like, Paul Ryan, AOC, Gretchen Whitmer, Chris Christie, Antony Blinken.
3/5 are not covered by ”VPs, Governors, notable Senators, and people who've previously run for president”.
My point is that the intersection of people who become president and had been VP's, Governers, Senators or previously run for president (20 years before) in the modern era is 2 (out of the last 21 presidents). I didn't go through and look at other major candidates, but the other major candidates didn't get elected; my sense is that the losing candidates, at least recently, have been more experienced politicians (hence, "Americans don't elect people who have been in the public eye for a long time"). Trump, Obama, W. Bush, Clinton, Reagan and Carter all got elected as "outsiders" against clearly more experienced establishment politicians.
An interesting thing I noticed going through that list, though, is that a much larger number of presidents came into a more visible position (such as the ones you mentioned) by T-15 years. It seems (and in fact this somewhat mirrors other leadership-oriented career paths) that ~15 years of visibility and experience (usually preceded by a local politics, private sector, or military career to build a network) is roughly optimal for a presidential career path.
10 years out, that selection criteria (VP's, governors, senators, former presidential candidates) would (as far as I can tell) have missed Trump, Obama, W. Bush, Clinton (narrowly), H.W. Bush, Carter, Ford, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, F.D. Roosevelt, Hoover, Coolidge, Harding, Wilson, Taft, and T. Roosevelt, so 17/21 of the people who actually became president.
Was this used to effectively silo developers from each other? Ie, don’t let the hardware team see the real software UI, and don’t let the software team see the real hardware UI.
It looks too ridiculous to be real, I suspect it was ugly by design.
Apple did this on the iPhone design, the ugly software UI was called “skankphone”.
It's so cool to see these pictures. It does seem to match David Shayer's description:
So they make what Apple calls a stealth case, which is just a big plastic box. So our stealth case was so ugly. It looked like they went into an old Russian medical equipment leftover warehouse and just took some plastic boxes, and stuck it in. It was horrible. They said basically, “ You’re writing the file system for this thing. You don’t need to know what’s on the disc. Just make it work.”
They weren't supposed to know what they were working on. To the extent that that was possible.
David: So, my guess is they were making some sort of secret Geiger counter and they wanted to be able to take it around and look for, I don’t know, people making dirty bombs maybe? But not have it looked like a Geiger counter.
David: if you wanted to go and check if there’s any signs of radiation in some place where you’re not officially supposed to be checking, you’re on a tourist visa in Tehran or something, this would be a very useful device. If you’re arrested with a Geiger counter you’re in trouble, but if someone looks at your iPod and the iPod works and it plays music and it’s totally normal, you’d be much safer, right?
I get why this is done when something is top secret. But I think there’s no better way to be reduced to a fungible coding cog than “you don’t actually need to understand the big picture. Here’s a spec. Implement it.”
My guess is that they used that case from early on in the project and then just stuck with it even as the electronics inside shrunk. It's not like the software people would be fooled by the enormous size; they knew they were making a pocketable music player.
Interestingly, the holes for the screen and the buttons look like they were molded, but the holes for the jacks and wheel look like they were milled. I wonder if the boxes were custom-made or something off-the-shelf that happened to have the right screen size and number of buttons.
Yeah, SLA printing was totes used in prototyping back then. It was just really expensive because the patents hadn't expired yet. I'd expect that Apple's R&D lab would have had access to them.
That is…not at all what this shows. Just because software engineers writing a file system don’t know what the final industrial design is going to be like doesn’t mean there aren’t people fully responsible for end user experience.
Giving out information on a need to know basis does not mean integration is impossible. It just means people that don’t need to don’t get to see the full picture.
Keep in mind that this kind of decide would be under development for many years, if you can keep the idea a secret until launch you’ll be years ahead of your competitors. But if it leaks your advantage is gone.
Uh, what? This makes no sense. It's not like the entire hardware and software teams were totally firewalled. Obviously higher ups and managers were in both circles and coordinated the development of both.
Yes, so if Apple were divided into separate hardware and software companies, then a third company X could order both these companies to come up with hardware and software solutions, and reach the same result. In this case, what you call management would be performed by the third company.
This is imho a better way of building things than having everything completely integrated in a single company. A fourth company could do the same thing as X and build an alternative iPod. And so could a fifth, etc.
> Wouldn't you agree that it is better if all companies have equal access to TSMC's services?
It’s certainly debatable, which is why we have antitrust regulations.
In the specific case you suggest of separate software and hardware companies, the reason that Apple has succeeded where others have failed (in large part) is because of their vertical integration. To wit: the equivalent of Apple (ignoring communication overhead, which is also huge) would be software and hardware companies that Apple has an exclusive contract with, who spend all of their time working on what Apple asks them to.
When they start serving other customers, their operational overhead increases, because they have to figure out how to schedule production schedules fairly across multiple contracts, and probably start to divide up their production functions by product area and customer.
They also typically end up having to make concessions to multiple customers, and risk ending up at a lowest-common-denominator product that fits the limitations of other customers more than it fits Apple’s specific set of capabilities and limitations. This is the market effect that drives standardization: agreeing on the lowest-common-denominator for everyone before production and product development starts.
In sum: they become less good at delivering specifically what Apple needs, whenever Apple needs it.
Why don't we remove all firm advantages completely and have a fully open playing field? Ban companies entirely, everyone is a free agent! Everything shall be an arms-length transaction with lawyers at every step.
Is the original poster sure the extra size wasn't to accommodate a 2.5" or 3.5" for testing purposes. There doesn't appear to be a physical HDD. In the 2nd prototype picture (not much for scale) it looks like a board with control logic, and maybe the decoder IC, and MCU, then a connection to a battery and lcd screen with it's controller circuit. I don't see an HDD, and solid state drives with capacity corresponding to the original ipod weren't on the market yet.
I was going through my things this weekend and I found an old iPod and one of those speakers with an integrated iPod holder. Was about to try and give the speaker away, but instead I set it up, put it on shuffle, and it’s delightful. Like a time capsule jukebox.
Feels somehow nicer to have an independent device doing its thing in the corner of the room, rather than streaming from my phone.
It drives me nuts that we have orders of magnitude more storage in our pockets now, yet many user experiences encourage streaming everything. Sure, unlimited plans ameliorate the costs of streaming, but why introduce all that complexity when you have unused storage sitting right there.
I’d like to know more about when Apple started working on the iPod. Especially given how crude this prototype was and the obvious amount of room for design revisions until the 2001 release.
To me, this makes it so much more obvious that the only innovation they were even aiming for was a scroll wheel. Everything else is just a Diamond Rio with a hard drive attached. That's not to diminish the effectiveness or novelty of the scroll wheel, but the larger capacity seems to be the only thing that actually mattered here.
You mean copying and pasting files that already contain metadeta? That was difficult? Because I'm pretty sure everyone universally hated the formats and auto-renamed files that iTunes forced.
I plugged in my iPod to my computer and it just worked: New music was copied, and any cleanup that I made to metadata was applied automatically. The formats that iTunes used were some of the highest quality audio available at a bit rate that would fit onto my giant iPod.
Before I had an iPod I had a Creative MP3 player. The player itself was decent, but manually copying the files to it really was a pain in the rear end, especially when I updated metadata.
Everyone except people who had better things to do than to maintain a huge library of files downloaded from KaZaa with no metadata beyond vaguely-standardized file names.
Sorry, but while Apple did succeed in manhandling the music industry, iTunes has never been a beloved piece of software. It has always been trash and barely worked. So to put it on some kind of pedestal is disingenuous, at best.
I loved iTunes. To this day it was my favorite all-in-one player, metadata editor, and syncing tool.
(Granted, I don't use it anymore now that streaming services are so awesome. But I miss it like I miss the feeling of buying a CD and listening to it on the way home.)
Your comment (especially the colloquial use of the word "literally" as emphasis) implies that I didn't address the existence of that photo, but I did when I said "scroll down to see photos that actually demonstrate its size". Your comment and subsequent lack of clarification ("Yes.") is confusing and has the appearance of rudeness, but I can't guess why you would want to use that tone (if it's on purpose).
I've owned one. But that was a million years ago. It's somewhere between the size of a box of matches and my current phone, but that's a pretty big range.
Edit: OK so maybe the reference of a gen 1 ipod is actually quite useful to me. But it's a 20 year old reference to use. Surely there are plenty of things around that are more useful as a reference point if you need one (or just provide measurements).
Based on the size of the barcodes, screen, various ports, the scrolling control + buttons (presumably sized for human fingers) I think it's pretty obvious it's rather large.
Yes, but that's not useful if you don't know that one is a headphone jack (from the side), or that the other is a JTAG connector, or you do know but don't know what sizes JTAG connectors come in. And even allowing for all that, visual size analogies provide very poor information when the common element is relatively small in both cases.
I'd be very interested to know where the JTAG connector is routed to on the other side... iPodLinux and Rockbox never did figure out some features, and to finally have a real dev kit means that we might finish it!
Actually I was just using my iPod 5.5G with Rockbox on 2021-10-05, doing a demo of iPod clickwheel -> USB -> Mac -> Arduino -> Rotary encoder -> (commercial product)
I wanted to use my old iPod 1G too, but serial-over-FireWire is a little complicated to set up.
Repairing iPods is what got me into embedded systems engineering in the first place! From a cassette player (age 9) to a 32 MB Rio 600 (age 10) to a MiniDisc player (age 11) to a 1st gen iPod (age 12, Feb 2002), then 3rd gen iPod (age 13, Sep 2003). After that, I was repairing friends' iPods, moderating the iPodLinux forum, reading the Bible as Notes, or Shakespeare for English class... good memories.
And I still use an iPod now! With an SSD, and adaptors stashed in the back.
