The ipod was around for three years before it took off in sales, and there were plenty of other music players available at the time that were more popular and had better functionality. Most of the iPod's initial success wasn't because of anything innovative about the product, but because of very, very savvy marketing.
It's very interesting to watch all this historical revisionism that paints Jobs as the mysterious shadowy figure that was the creator of the digital portable music device, which was a boom product from day 1. Don't forget, Apple has also had several flops over the past decade, but no-one remembers them because of selective bias.
Jobs was an incredible man, but let's see him for what he did; don't turn him into a myth.
I'm a programmer. 3-4 years ago, I bought an iRiver. It got great reviews, it was supposedly better than an iPod, and you could put Real Rhapsody music on it. I literally spent over an hour attempting to load music on it, and failed. It used some kind of Windows Media Player plugin to load music with an interface from hell. I never even attempted to load Rhapsody music on it, god knows if it would have worked.
The iPod didn't win by accident, or cause of marketing. Sometimes the best product wins.
Not sure why this got downmodded. The ipod came out in 2001. It didn't really take off until 2004. The guy I'm responding to is talking about UX from 2007-08, well after the maturation of the digital music player. iRiver sucking in 2007 does not mean that the iPod didn't suck in 2002.
iPod's chief competition at the time was the Nomad (as captured in Rob Malda's classic iPod review).
I bought a Nomad in August 2001 (roughly two months before the iPod came out). I have never had more remorse at being an early adopter.
The Nomad was the size of two Sony CD Walkmans stuck together. Its interface was a series of four fiddly buttons and a dire lo-res LCD screen. The iPod was a tremendous improvement in every single respect.
The reason why the iPod wasn't an immediate hit was because it was only available for the Mac. iTunes for Windows didn't get released until 2003.
If the iPod sucked in 2002, every other hard-drive based MP3 player sucked more.
This discussion was regarding whether or not the iPod counted as a dominant product line under Jobs. What particular year an iRiver anecdotally sucked, or whether the initial batch of iPods were as good as those brick sized Nomads is completely irrelevant to the fact that the iPod product line decimated every competitor in the market over its lifespan.
You can not be serious. It shows up as an external hard drive. Copy your music over. Done. But maybe you've never used a floppy disk or flash drive? I could see it being confusing then.
Did you ever own a non-iPod MP3 player? The user experience on those devices was usually terrible (especially navigating through songs without a scroll wheel). Loading songs onto those players was painful, or at least nowhere near as simple as iTunes (especially once Apple bought SoundJam).
Additionally, Jobs' relentless addition/pruning of the iPod lines (mini/shuffle/nano/color/touch/etc) kept Apple with both a streamlined offering and ~70% market share.
I'm not arguing that the first ("less space than a nomad") iPod was a revolutionary device at launch. But dismissing the iPod's success as "savvy marketing" is doing the device a huge disservice.
Yes, I owned several MP3 players of the era, one of them an iPod video. I found the ipod at the time to be one of the most frustrating to load media onto - as one memorable example, it wouldn't let me load .mp4s into the 'TV' folder, because .mp4s are 'Movies'. No argument will be entered into. wtf?
Loading music was no better or worse than other players I had, but iTunes was still horrendous bloatware. Why do I need to install Quicktime - absolutely and utterly useless to me - to simply move files from hard drive to ipod?! Some MP3 players I had just let you drag and drop with a file explorer and they would 'just work', plus you could use the software to do it 'properly' if you felt like. One chinese knock-off I had simply played the songs in the order you copied them on, which was weird :) Then there's things like radios - ipod had none, despite it being a clear feature people wanted for years.
But yes, I had several MP3 players of the era, and the ipod was nothing special in terms of user experience. The hardware case was pretty, admittedly.
People are viewing the early digital music player market with the rosy-coloured glasses of historical revisionism. Apple are top dog now, so it somehow stands to reason they always were? Logical fallacy. The early ipods weren't great, and it wasn't Apple out there leading us all into the digital music new world, there was a passel of competitors.
I think you also underestimate marketing - higher market share does not mean that the product is inherently better (betamax vs VHS, anyone? Or the OS war of your choice?). Apple has an incredible marketing team, and frankly good marketing does mean something significant, or there wouldn't be so much money in it.
Weird. After reading this, I'm not sure you come from the same planet I do.
I literally had the exact opposite experience you did. I couldn't afford an iPod when it was released, so I bought the Chinese knock-off. Several, actually -- I worked at Circuit City at the time and got an incredible employee discounts on them. And all had horrendous software, as well as plenty of hardware glitches. The software rarely worked as advertised and I usually had to resort to some sort of hack or third party program to get MP3's loaded in any sort of format I wanted them to work in.
It wasn't until years later when I could finally afford an iPod Mini that I finally found an MP3 player that worked on even a basic serviceable level. I still have that iPod mini, and it works perfect. If I didn't have an iPhone already, that would be my MP3 player for when I work out.
If you're speaking to computer know-how and aptitude, I am a programmer today, so I do not feel it is my ability that held me back.
It's not entirely fair to compare the top-of-the-line product to a bottom-of-the-line product. Before the iPod even existed I had a Creative Nomad with an eight megabyte SmartMedia card. It worked, and faithfully played one single low-bitrate album at a time for years. Still would if I bothered to dig it out of the closet.
Other than offering more capacity (years later at a higher price), the iPod really wasn't radically better than my old Nomad. I'll grant that the iPod was a great product, but it wasn't a revolutionary product in the way that the iPhone was. The iPod is certainly better than the absolute worst of the market, but it was only a little better than the best of the market at the time.
The chinese knock-off was only mentioned because of it's weird play order: physical order on the disk, not any way of ordering songs by metadata or filename. That particular MP3 player wasn't very good, from memory.
MP3 players sucked. You had to manually copy music onto them or use the absolutely crappy music libraries that came with them.
With the iPod you have your nicely organized music library and you sync it with your device. For the vast majority of people that so much better than manually copying music. I would never want to go back to the world where I copied music manually.
I agree on the marketing being important, but I remember thinking at the time it first came out that the iPod was by far the smallest hard disk mp3 player I'd seen - the first that might be practical for the non-geek market. Were there others around that time that I'm not aware of?
It's very interesting to watch all this historical revisionism that paints Jobs as the mysterious shadowy figure that was the creator of the digital portable music device, which was a boom product from day 1. Don't forget, Apple has also had several flops over the past decade, but no-one remembers them because of selective bias.
Jobs was an incredible man, but let's see him for what he did; don't turn him into a myth.