Interesting article, thanks for that. One of my key takeaways is the iPod represented not one but multiple simultaneous tech revolutions. Consumer storage until then unseen, paired with material and interface design that companies hadn't considered a priority.
I forget the exact timeline, but I think part of it too was music pricing. Physical media (tapes, records) had gotten very expensive, and almost everyone was pirating MP3s from Napster etc. Apple's iTunes prices were low enough that it became simpler just to buy stuff legally than pirate it.
I can't recall if iTunes was introduced at exact same time as iPod not not. Google search suggests it may have been 1 or 2 years later, but if so then where were people originally getting music to put on iPods ?
> Apple's iTunes prices were low enough that it became simpler just to buy stuff legally than pirate it.
I think this is why Spotify/Netflix are so successful. Streaming a good amount of content for a reasonable price is more convenient + less time wasted (+ less stress and moral implications) compared to pirating.
I used to pirate music/videos all the time and the moment those services were available I stopped because it was just easier to use them. Good UX can trump many other factors.
100%. I stopped pirating altogether for a few years because everything I needed was conveniently available, at a low price. I've told multiple people that if anime had a netflix equivalent with nice UX, I would happily pay for it.
Sadly now I feel like the UX and recommendation system of netflix/disney/hulu/etc. is genuinely worse than just pirating. I still pay for spotify though, its feature full, fairly cheap, and delivers all the songs in the world into my pocket
Yeah - the streaming fragmentation really does feel like it's being brought back full circle. I think I'm in the minority of binging a show only when it's completed, and only ever subscribing for a service for a month-at-a-time.
Although, I do keep Disney+ for my child, and Peacock because I still watch the Office a lot.
Anything you have thats missing on spotify? For me one of the killer features of spotify is the ability to view and integrate songs on local/NAS storage into playlists, the few foreign tracks I had ripped worked just fine
At the least there are several songs I had saved that now have been pulled from Spotify. Mostly from smallish artists (<100k monthly listeners) but still...
I tried it for a while, it didn't seem to have all the shows I wanted and the UX was worse than quite a few of the anime piracy sites.
Of course, anime is a bit of an oddball when it comes to piracy sites, the lack of legal enforcement combined with (from what I've noticed) that a disproportionate part of the audience are developers means there are some really good sites out there.
I remember wanting to watch the HBO "Rome" TV series when I didn't have HBO, so therefore downloading it from usenet in some weird text format - had to combine multiple large downloaded chunks using some tool chain I forget (I think rar was involved). Now, that was painful. Nowadays I'll happily throw a few bucks to whatever streaming service to watch what I want on my Roku TV.
The iTunes being discussed here was not a streaming platform. It was a library management platform (2001) that also offered purchase and download of FairPlay DRM-laden music files (2003). Later it would offer DRM-free MP3 download for select music (2007) and eventually its entire catalog (2009).
Why be so quick to jump to "I can tell someone why they're wrong"? Taking the time to read their comment a second time might lead to the realisation that they clearly weren't commenting based on a perceived connection of 'streaming platforms', the connection was "business models which succeeded on account of offering a legal & convenient service cheap enough for people to choose it over their previous piracy".
Maybe I've just done the exact same thing, perhaps I was wrong to read an attempted correction into your comment and you just thought you were adding some interesting additional information to the conversation. In which case my bad, and sorry. But I think unlikely you'd share that as random "fun fact" extra info rather than replying to a misunderstanding of the previous comment's point.
> The iTunes being discussed here was not a streaming platform.
I never said it was. The point was not a comparison of iTunes to streaming - but the proposed UX enhancement iTunes provided mapped a way that was even simpler than pirating per u/HarHarVeryFunny, which made it worth it at the time to switch from pirating in their mind.
Streaming made this even easier in my opinion, and was the catalyst that prompted me to stop. Granted - when I was a teenager, I simply didn't have any money even for iTunes purchases - but when Spotify came around, I had just gotten my first job, and made the switch then.
> but if so then where were people originally getting music to put on iPods
The first iPod was a Mac-only Firewire device. "You need a Mac with Firewire support to even use this thing" set a minimum platform spec that also made other things implicit — in this case, the availability of a CD-ROM drive. (Which wasn't a given in 2001, but was a given on any Mac that had Firewire support.)
iTunes the software was introduced alongside the iPod; but the iTunes Music Store was not. iTunes was, at first, a CD ripping program (and library manager for music ripped from CD.) To buy music for your iPod, you'd go to the record store, buy a CD, put it in your Mac, rip it, and then load it onto the iPod.
And while, yes, music piracy slightly predated the iTunes Music Store, there were a lot of people buying iPods in that era who had fancy Mac computers, but just plain didn't have internet service to their homes, and so for whom music piracy wasn't really a possibility†. 2001 was an interesting time; Internet access was still very unevenly distributed, and in ways that had nothing to do with economic conditions. Rural areas might have phone lines so bad that even a 28.8kbps modem wouldn't work over them. The rollout of ISDN was only just getting started, and was limited to regions with less red tape (much like fiber rollouts in the last decade.)
† Well, okay, a different form of music piracy was probably happening in these Internet-starved areas: if you were willing to shell out for a CD burner for your Mac (not an internal option, rather an external SCSI-over-Firewire one), then you could also use iTunes to burn those ripped songs back onto a mix-tape CD — and then you could give them to your friends, who could in turn rip them to their PCs. Shame about the quality loss in the process (given iTunes' default ripping encoding of 128kbps AAC — though 256kbps AAC was possible even back then), but it'd be no worse than what dubbing between literal compact cassettes would get you, and certainly better than what you'd get by downloading the Napster-standard 96kbps MP3. (And CD-to-CD streaming bitwise dubbing was also possible back then, too, but not with iTunes, only expensive third-party software; I don't think anyone but professional bootleggers had any reason to try that for music. It was more a thing for ensuring you get clean working copies of PC "must have the CD-ROM in to play" games.)
> in this case, the availability of a CD-ROM drive. (Which wasn't a given in 2001, but was a given on any Mac that had Firewire support.)
It would have still been pretty odd to see a PC with no CD-ROM drive in 2001. It wasn't a given a machine would have a DVD-ROM drive in 2001, but CD-ROM was cheap by 2001 and rather ubiquitous.
Most home PCs in a box started shipping with CD-ROM in the mid 90s, along with Windows 95/98 etc, and by 2001 virtually all new software you bought at retail would require you to have one.
The firewire port was largely because IIRC USB 2 didnt exist at launch of iPod - transferring 5GB via USB 1 was painfully slow, the trick the iPod could do at the time that no competitor could was sync 1000 songs incredibly quickly.
> iTunes the software was introduced alongside the iPod
This isn't the case, iTunes was released before the iPod- before iPod "Rip/Mix/Burn" was a big marketing strategy for the iMac. The iPod did follow quickly though. Many of us had substantial libraries in iTunes before the iPod landed. Wikipedia suggests it was iTunes 2.0 that brought iPod support.
> by 2001 virtually all new software you bought at retail would require you to have one.
Yeah, but a piece of consumer electronics requiring someone to own a computer produced in the last five years (as a Firewire Mac would have been at the time) is a surprising choice, and especially so in that era. The majority of scanners and printers produced in 2001 were still parallel-port driven, because peripheral companies couldn't be sure that most people even had a computer with USB1.0 support yet. Windows XP was CD-only, but Windows 2000 still had a floppy-disk edition!
I wasn't really implying that Apple forced the spec of "a Mac with Firewire" in order to guarantee access to a CD-ROM drive; but it certainly did help, in the sense that if they had supported USB (or god forbid, parallel) from the start, and perhaps Windows from the start, then there would almost certainly have been people who bought an iPod for use on their Pentium 120 (like the one I was still personally using in 2001!), only to belatedly realize that they had no way of getting music onto their PC in order to then offload it onto the iPod.
It honestly wasn't during this period. in 2001, computers did not last as long as they do today, with performance doubling often every year to 18 months. Ask anyone who lived this period - by 2001, virtually everything had CD-ROM. If you didn't have CD-ROM in 2001, you literally couldn't buy or run most software, and again, CD-ROM had been standard in most pcs since around 96/97.
For what its worth, Microsoft Office 97 was last version to come with floppy disk release alongside the CD-ROM (46 floppies too...). That tells you a great deal about the state of CD-ROM in the late 90s. Office 2001, CD-ROM release only. There are many other examples you can point to. The PC game industry was ~100% CD-ROM or optical media in 2001 too.
You're talking about the period starting in 2001. I'm talking about the period ending in 2001. 2001 was a transition point from slow progress to the sort of performance-doubling progression you're thinking of. PCs running Windows 3.1 stuck around, doing what they do, until ~2002. People kept making games for DOS until ~2002! Then that all stopped. But someone planning a product for release in 2001, would tend to have been planning in mind of the previous era, not that new era. Except Apple, of course — as they tend to have their finger on the pulse of those sorts of changes (thus removing the floppy drive in the iMac, etc.)
> If you didn't have CD-ROM in 2001, you literally couldn't buy or run most software, and again, CD-ROM had been standard in most pcs since around 96/97.
While yes, this is true, most people didn't buy most software. I think you may have lived in a bit of a tech bubble. At the time, "retail-boxed PC software" was a thing only PC enthusiasts bought!
In that era, outside of a few coastal US cities with great Internet connectivity, most home PCs were used permanently disconnected from the Internet, with only the software that came loaded by the OEM (which is why, to this day, OEMs still feel an obligation to do that.) This is also why
> Microsoft Office 97 was last version to come with floppy disk release alongside the CD-ROM (46 floppies too...)
...because, if you look at PCs after 1996, they all had enough hard-drive space to ship with OEM-preinstalled copies of Microsoft Office. And they almost always did.
But most people of that era weren't buying new PCs. Most people of that era still only had the same PC they bought possibly nearly-a-decade prior, to be the fancy electric typewriter for their kids' book reports. Because nothing was demanding quite yet for them to upgrade. Because they weren't keeping up with new software. It was a "cycle of stagnation", per se.
It was only once Internet connectivity started improving in rural areas, and the web started developing multimedia killer apps with resource requirements that made old PCs feel slow, that the rest of the world started catching up, looking around, and wondering whether they indeed needed a new PC. (And even then, there was a lot of pushback, from a crowd who had up until that point got by with for years with the same first PC they ever bought; who was entirely unused to technology that changes out from under them. Especially when it was a teenager who wanted access to these killer apps — their parents often didn't get it. "Why do we need a new PC? The old one still works! This is like replacing a refrigerator that's still refrigerating!")
In short, this is why everything other than the iPod, in this era, was still using parallel. Consumer electronics people knew that for every one Silicon Valley technophile who has home broadband, there were 100 teen girls in Kansas with no Internet running Windows 98SE, who might nevertheless be swayed to buy an MP3 player — perhaps to then load it with music ripped from tapes using the PC's line-in jack with a program (distributed on an accompanying floppy!) that does some awful kind of low-bitrate but low-CPU-usage streaming compression.
It wasn't just that it took until 2003 for Apple to secure the IP rights necessary to launch the iTunes Music Store. It really just wouldn't have made sense in 2001. Too few people online to buy music to make sense of the licensing fees. But the adoption curve was clear (and clearly exponential); so Apple started work early, and got the deals done by 2003, when it would start being a profitable venture. Other companies, meanwhile — ones with large IP-rights-holders as partners — had tried the same thing years earlier! But those companies couldn't turn a profit. (At least outside of the few very special "even grandmas here are ahead of the rest of the world" markets of the time, like Japan.)
> Ask anyone who lived this period
To be clear, I'm probably older than you. I'm describing what I saw around me, at my house and my friends' houses and my school and my parents' offices and so forth, as someone who lived in a somewhat-rural area [town of ~50k people] from ~1995 until ~2007.
*2001 was a transition point from slow progress to the sort of performance-doubling progression you're thinking of.*
You are way off here. Lets check a contemporary source to understand the public sentiment at the time:
"My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique
Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight"
Weird Al - 1999
You also are totally incorrect about internet connectivity adoption at that point.
> "My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks But it was obsolete before I opened the box You say you've had your desktop for over a week? Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight"
Yes, all that is true... for people who were frequently trying to do anything "interesting" with their computers. Most people didn't try to do anything interesting with their computers! Most people — your average plumber in a small town in Ohio, for example — bought a computer for "productivity" (i.e. running Word); never played a single game on it other than the ones that came with Windows; and forgot it existed basically 99% of the time. Eventually, maybe they got AOL because of the free trial CD/floppy, and checked their email once a month. (But not more often than that; they didn't want to tie up their phone line!)
For these people, buying a piece of consumer electronics like an MP3 player, that forced them to use their computer to populate it (or, indeed, to do anything other than using Word), was a confusing incursion into what had previously been an analogue affair of tape dubbing, suddenly surprising them that the machine they thought would be just fine, had suddenly "gone bad" (i.e. gone obsolete) despite having been left mostly untouched.
> You also are totally incorrect about internet connectivity adoption at that point.
You are aware that in plenty of places that theoretically had the capacity for Internet connectivity, there were still many people who didn't bother to actually get Internet access, because they had no use for it, and that (unlike today) nothing out there demanded they get online to e.g. file their taxes, right?
Or that, even for many people "with Internet", they were still essentially using a captive portal experience (like AOL) at that point, with no web browser, FTP client, or anything else that would ever lead them to try to download a piece of software or anything else 1MB or larger, right?
Also, you know there are places outside the US, right? And that consumer electronics manufacturers care very much about selling into non-US markets? Look at global Internet penetration in 2001. Think about what you'd have to do to sell a consumer electronics device to someone in India or Indonesia in 2001.
My point wasn't that any of these factors pertained to the specific technosphere bubble that Apple released — and still releases — its products into. My point was, in fact, the opposite: that Apple is distinctive among consumer electronics manufacturers for a product marketing strategy involving addressing only that technosphere bubble. Everyone else used to target the lowest common denominator — that Ohioan plumber with the "antique paperweight", or even whatever someone might be using as a computer somewhere in Nigeria or the Philippines at that time.
I'm from 1987, and born in Spain. Most DOS games (mainly shareware ones from magazines) were dead by ~1998-1999. Multimedia software exploded since 1996 even for multimedia CD's in Spanish, such as encyclopedias, cooking guides, video guides, tourist VR views, Trivia games and so on. No one mentally sane would develop for DOS in 2001. Period. By 1999 everyone who was a PC user had a CD drive for it, at least to install Windows 98 and any modern game. That's it.
Floppies were only used to share small documents and maybe some split(1)/Hacha splitted software from cybercafes into some floppy stacks.
And to boot from floppy on unsupported PC's.
Bear in mind that most Pentium MMX based PC's had a CD drive. Even the ones still running in 2002 were CD based.
Internet access was arguably more equal between rural and urban areas in the late 90s, early 2000s. Few had broadband and dial up was mostly the same regardless where you were living. Most PCs had a CD-ROM drive in 2000. You didn't need good internet to go to a store to pick up a copy of StarCraft, Diablo, Half-Life, Age of Empires, Quake III etc. but you did need a CD-ROM drive and decent PC. I grew up in a rural area too. Most of my friends had games like StarCraft or Diablo too
The idea CD-ROM wasn't ubiquitous in the PC industry and consumer desktops at large in 2001 is just laughable, I'm amazed this is still being debated. Do some people just choose not to remember the explosion in the "multimedia" industry in the 90s?
If you really want to put this to bed, just look at any vintage PC magazine from 97 onwards archived on archive.org, and pay attention to the adverts, which are a literal snapshot of what people could buy at that time. Good luck finding a consumer desktop PC at any price from the Windows 98 era onwards without a CD-ROM.
In 1998, most PC magazines even had demo CD-ROMs stuck to the cover, such was the wide penetration of CD-ROM drives.
I got my first Mac in 1995 (Performa 5200CD). Obvious from its name, it had a built in CD-ROM drive.
I had the internet throughout the rest of the 90’s, dialing up via a series of external modems. 14.4, 28.8, 33.6, and eventually a 56k modem. I downloaded MP3s and played them with SoundJam MP (which Apple bought and reskinned as iTunes).
That computer was so slow (75MHz PowerPC 603) that it took nearly all of its resources to play an MP3. However, my next computer was a B&W Power Mac G3 (released in 1999) running at 400 MHz.
The difference was night and day, way more than the 5 times implied by the clock speed. Around that time I also got cable Internet (6Mbit) which was far faster than 56K dialup (yes, more than 100X faster).
By the time the iPod came out I had more music than could even fit on the 5GB hard drive. I waited till the 3rd gen and got the 40GB model.
I honestly don’t think my experience was atypical of computer enthusiasts at the time (the type of people who read Slashdot and later HN). It was only grandmas who bought a Pentium 120 in the mid 90’s and hung onto it for decades.
To be clear, my point was that consumer electronics — like the iPod — were and are typically targeted at "everyone", not "computer enthusiasts" (which would be far too few people to be worth the CapEx of hardware product development); and that, for every one computer enthusiast on Earth, there are 100 grandmas (and other similar demographics.)
(Professional electronics, on the other hand, could make all sorts of demands and assume a very specific niche audience, because they were incredibly high-margin. There used to be a big difference between professional vs consumer electronics in terms of not just what parts they used, but what connectivity standards they could assume.)
> It was only grandmas who bought a Pentium 120 in the mid 90’s and hung onto it for decades.
And, uh, you know... poor people. Blue-collar poor people, who don't care much about computing. But who would really would like to listen to some music as they take the bus to work.
As I said in my original post, Apple was doing something very exceptional within the space of consumer electronics, by selling a consumer device (not a professional device!) that actually assumed a niche market (computer enthusiasts, who had thus purchased a recent Mac) rather than being "for everyone."
The original iPod was a Mac-only device. Anyone who bought it expecting it to work on their Windows computer, whether it was brand new or Pentium 120-vintage, would've quickly discovered the incompatibility and returned it to the store. Moreover, the initial price for a first gen iPod was $399 ($672 US in 2023 money). Not something I would expect to be affordable to a person struggling along with a 6-year-old computer (Pentium 120 came out in 1995).
For a device that only played music and only worked with FireWire-equipped Macs, the original iPod was not an "everyone" device, it was a luxury product for music enthusiasts.
No, you are wrong. Since Windows 98, having a machine with a CD was mandatory to be a multimedia PC. Heck, I remember four CD game releases such as Blade Runner.
Okay? You're talking about the requirements for new computers in the era, that retail software could assume. Meanwhile, I'm talking about the requirements for consumer electronics sold into the market in the era; where, to have the widest TAM, companies would usually design connectivity around the assumption that the person purchasing the device has a very old computer.
I was there, period. If by year 2001 you didn't have a CD drive to play Unreal (1998), Deus Ex (2000) or Max Payne (2001), your PC was seriously outdated junk and no company would take your PC seriously even for office work.
In 1999, yes, maybe a 486 with Windows 95 could be barely usable, but most basic software required a Pentium with MMX because of multimedia and optimisations. That's it. We already were in the Pentium II era, not owning a K6 or Pentium MMX
would outclass you in a breeze for any serious task.
AMD and VIA CPU's were really cheap and by 1999 having a machine with a Pentium MMX-like specs with a CDROM was the norm because of that.
And OFC by 1999 DOS was pretty much dead and everyone switched to Windows 95 at least.
Yes, there were people and nerds like me in 2004 totally being able to use FreeBSD/Linux under a 486 with 16MB of RAM to play downscaled MP3's, nethack and surf the web with Lynx. But for sure we weren't the target of commercial software vendors.
By the year 2001, the minimal computer specs skyrocketed for everyone since 1997.
Looks like USB support for syncing was introduced in 2003, and for charging in 2004.
Mine was a 4th generation monochrome - in other words, 2004ish. Had to have been USB. I don't think there were any Firewire Macs before 1999, and I don't think I ever got a Mac after that point, or that ran OS X.
For sure. My memory of those days is getting hazy, but IIRC CD's from top artists were going for $15-$16 in the late 90's. Maybe $12 if you were lucky. Considering inflation and that you might only want two of the twelve songs on the disk, you could easily be paying $10/song (in 2023 dollars). Big chunk of change especially for a pre-teen or teenager.
>IIRC CD's from top artists were going for $15-$16 in the late 90's.
That's because the labels were engaging in pricefixing and blacklisting retailers who did not go along with their scheme. People suspected it but nothing really happened until the FTC stepped in.
I seem to recall typically being able to buy major CDs in the $14 range in ~1995, but the expensive stores (Tower Records) charged $18.99 and up which is very clear in my mind. That's more than $37 in today's money.
The iPod came out in 2001. The iTunes Music Store came out in 2003.
And the iTunes app itself came out 9 months before the iPod.
Apple had a big marketing push “rip, mix, burn”. iTunes had excellent support for ripping CDs and burning them to CD. I used iTunes for creating CDs for years and didn’t get my first iPod until 2006.
Back in the early days of podcast support I remember downloading episodes over dialup (slower than real time) and burning them to CD occasionally for listening elsewhere
There was no iTunes music store at that time. Apple was advertising how fast iTunes could rip music from a CD and in my experience it was definitely optimised for that.
I surely remember much of my computer time being from ripping my CDs, borrowing friend's CDs to rip, going to the library (excellent source, really), to rip their CDs, etc.
Napster was all but toast once iTunes was on the scene, but Kaza and Limewire weren't any better in the problem of getting say, a whole album (those were still a thing) perfectly cataloged with metadata - and in high quality. iTunes made that very easy.
With the iPod, I would then just borrow people's iPods instead of CDs.
I didn't get into - and actually still don't subscribe to, a music service like Spotify. A few years after starting above, I would still just buy CDs from touring bands (these were bands driving cross country in vans and playing condemned warehouses, so safe to say their stuff wasn't being traded as mp3's, and if they were, they would have LOVED it). I remember buying some music off of iTunes Music, but I tried to not, as sharing their the system I had didn't work well - or even across my own devices.
MySpace Music was also big in discovery. Their whole music catalog was lost, though, right? Someone lost the private key?
I mean, people at the time did have large collections of CDs with tons of music. Piracy existed, sure, but it was something a relatively small number of tech-savvy people were doing. Hell only half of Americans were even using the internet at the time. And at the time, MP3s were super inconvenient - you needed a CD for your stereo or whatever you were listening to music on, and CD-R drives had only just started to become cheap (and by cheap, I still mean several hundred dollars, which was quite a bit at the time). I would be in no way surprised if greater than 90% of the music that was loaded onto the first cohort of ipods came directly from CDs.
Yea another example is the NVIDIA Tegra. NVIDIA tried to use it to make their own portable gaming device but then Nintendo figured out how to use it to make the switch.
Not to forget the Toshiba AC100 with the original Tegra, which was one of the first usable ARM laptops (netbooks?) and helped much of Linux desktop support development for ARM in the early days.
> One of my key takeaways is the iPod represented not one but multiple simultaneous tech revolutions. Consumer storage until then unseen
I disagree entirely, for reasons that should be obvious once we examine the actual state of the market at the time. Storage was not the thing that made iPod successful.
The microdrive had existed for several years by then[0][1], developed originally for digital cameras. Like most storage technologies, it was growing in capacity as time went on. I don't think "technology gets marginally better with time" counts as a "tech revolution", nor do I think the microdrive counted as a consumer storage technology that was previously unseen by the time the iPod launched. A physically larger 1.8-inch microdrive (with consequently greater capacity) also does not count as a revolution... it's like making a bigger montor and being surprised that you have more screen real estate.
I also find the anecdote you replied to confusing because surely Apple would have known what a microdrive was before this meeting. That part of the anecdote makes no sense. IBM had their own 1GB microdrive by June of 2000, so even if Apple had exclusive rights to Toshiba's larger 1.8-inch microdrives, that seems entirely irrelevant, contrary to the "key takeaway" that the anecdote posited.
Maybe Apple would have slightly higher storage capacities, but... we're talking about a relatively marginal difference compared to the gulf in storage capacity between these microdrive MP3 players and the flash based MP3 players of the time. An advantage, but not a revolution.
As it turns out, Apple didn't even have a storage capacity advantage[2], in direct contradiction to the anecdote posted upthread.
"A second generation of Microdrive was announced by IBM in June 2000 with increased capacities at 512MB and 1GB, with the 512 MB model costing $399 and the 1 GB model costing $499."
Yes, storage technology existed at the time, but it was an order of magnitude more expensive than what Apple needed to put in a consumer product.
It's unquestionable that iPod unleashed the explosive miniaturization of technology, and paved the road for everything that we saw in the following decade with smartphones.
Those prices were still from over a year before Apple announced the iPod, in a market where technology was rapidly advancing and getting cheaper, and those were the MSRP for single unit quantities, not the bulk order prices that would have been available at launch, let alone the bulk order prices that would have been available when Apple was planning to launch their iPod.
As others have pointed out here, there were other competitors offering larger-than-1-inch hard drives like the ones Apple used.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, a portable MP3 player with about 5GB of storage was actually introduced about 2 years before the iPod.
Based on the available evidence, storage was not the defining feature that made iPod successful, which is the claim that anecdote was trying to make. The iPod was successful for other reasons, regardless of how emotionally compelling that anecdote tries to be.
> It's unquestionable that iPod unleashed the explosive miniaturization of technology, and paved the road for everything that we saw in the following decade with smartphones.
PDAs were being developed at the same time as the iPod and probably have a much better parental claim than the iPod. The first smartphones -- the ones before the iPhone -- were basically PDAs with cellular modems, and utilized the similar OSes as their non-modem-bearing predecessors.
Agree there were many attempts before. Heck, even General Magic created an iPhone-like experience over a decade earlier!
But none of those early predecessors achieved anything even close to the scale of the iPod.
I'm not arguing that Apple is the sole responsible for miniaturization of technology, but selling dozens of millions (and eventually hundreds of millions) of their gizmo certainly helped fast-forward the industry. Things would have happened a lot slower if it weren't for the iPod.
I didn't know about the Microdrive but Wikipedia says model larger than 1GB up to 4GB were first available in 2004, nearly 3 years after the iPod. At that time for $499 it costed you could already get a 40GB iPod.
Yeah, apple surely could've negotiated price discounts and I'm not sure what the bill of materials cost of the Toshiba hard drives were, but the larger IBM Microdrives were released in late 2000 and were $499 for the 1GB version (https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-1-gb-microdrive/). Even if that's a 100% markup, you're talking about $250 for 1GB.
Hard to build a consumer device with a MSRP of $399 if one of the components is over 60% of that cost. Competing firms estimated the total BOM for the original iPod at more like $200.
They were also surely looking at the potential trajectory of storage improvements too -- by the time the 4gb microdrives had been released in 2004, Apple was already shipping 40gb iPods and selling them for $499.
I had added this paragraph before you posted but probably after you saw my comment:
>> Maybe Apple would have slightly higher storage capacities, but... we're talking about a relatively marginal difference compared to the gulf in storage capacity between these microdrive MP3 players and the flash based MP3 players of the time. An advantage, but not a revolution.
Regardless, it turns out that it wasn't even a capacity advantage, since the Personal Jukebox[0][1] was released in 1999 and offered 4.8GB of storage in a package that weighed 300g instead of the 185g of the 2001 iPod. A difference in weight, sure, but... modern smartphones are often between those two weights, so a few extra grams would have been fine and the Personal Jukebox would have flown off shelves, if storage capacity was the defining feature.
Just telling a compelling anecdote doesn't make it accurate. Apple had other advantages at the time, including the scroll wheel and iTunes, as well as brand recognition. Based on the evidence of what existed at the time, I do not think storage was the compelling thing that made iPod more of a success than the Personal Jukebox.
I think the whole anecdote sounds like a story that's been told a few too many times (including variations of Toshibas helpless product department making stuff they didn't know how to sell), because finding "that one thing" that made a difference" makes for a good story.
Rubinstein saw the drive and realized that the price level and size was perfect for their product idea. And he had buy-in from the higher ups so they could negotiate a certain volume and price that made the project feasible.
That doesn't mean another company couldn't have been successful with a smaller 1GB drive (seeing the success of the smaller iPods later on) or a physically bigger 5GB drive (people were still carrying around walkmans and CD players).
What Apple managed to pull off was making a device that was easy to get music into (with iTunes) and easy to use (with the clickwheel) and, yes, compact and with good design and marketing.
100% agree with your entire comment. That is exactly what I believe too, based on the evidence I've seen. That anecdote is entirely too clever to be accurate. It was probably built on a kernel of truth, but it has been embellished to a degree that appears to make it contradict the reality that existed at the time.
Ah, you must not have seen the pre-ipod players. The Personal Jukebox was 2.5 larger than an ipod. It didn't fit in a pocket and the grey plastic felt cheap compared to the ipod's shiny metal back. It really felt experimental, and nothing like the polished Walkmen Sony was making.
That's... also what I'm saying, yes. I think we agree?
iPod was not successful because it was the only thing offering high storage capacity. It wasn't the only one. iPod was successful because it offered a touch wheel, iTunes, and Apple's brand recognition. As you point out, it also had very good build quality. None of these things have to do with some exceptional storage capacity.
Apple’s brand recognition wasn’t anything special at the time. The iPod was essentially their first meaningful entry into consumer music. Compared with say Sony, they were nobody - a recently failing maker of outdated computers.
But compared to the brand recognition of Remote Solution? The Remote Solution Personal Jukebox beat iPod to the punch by 2 years on offering a high capacity 5GB portable MP3 player, but it was not some runaway success. Apple's brand recognition was far higher than Remote Solution, which certainly was a factor in helping iPod to succeed where Personal Jukebox did not. (Not the only factor, of course, but one factor.)
Apple's brand may not have been as good as Sony in the music space, but Apple was still a very well-known brand, even if they were struggling at the time.
As has been said elsewhere - it didn’t beat apple to anything because it was giant, had a poor UI and no meaningful companion software. It was a prototype that wasn’t ready for the market. Nothing more.
Comparing the iPod to junk that happens to match on one spec or another tells us nothing.
Elsewhere... as in the comment that I replied to? Which you then replied to me?
I was literally in agreement with the "elsewhere" that you're referring to. Your comments are confusing to me. Storage capacity was not the thing that made iPod successful, even though the anecdote at the top of this thread is trying to make that argument. There were a number of other factors that were more important. That's what I said and that's what the "elsewhere" also appears to have said. That's exactly what you just said too, so you're literally agreeing with me, but you want to argue for some reason.
Still, "Apple" was a much better brand than {someone no one has ever heard of}, which matters for something like the Personal Jukebox.
> Now imagine it the other way around - if apple had released the jukebox, and ‘remote solution’ had released the iPod.
They probably would have both failed, in that case. Apple for delivering a product that wasn't good enough, and Personal Solutions for having no brand recognition and no retail partnerships/network.
> Startups with no brand succeed all the time, if they have a great product.
Launching a physical product back then wasn't as easy as launching a Kickstarter and eventually transitioning to an Amazon listing. Just having a good product didn't mean you knew how to get it into the hands of customers. Things are much easier these days, and even so... lots of good products still fail to reach market for reasons that have nothing to do with the product itself.
The design on the Personal Jukebox is rough. It reminds me of those cheap no-name PDAs from the late 90s/early 00s that were less capable than the earliest Palm and Newton models and more like toys than tools.
I bought an Archos Jukebox portable MP3 player refurbished with a 20 GB HDD (2.5") in June 2001 (original 6 GB release was December 2000). While not as pocketable and sleek as the iPod, when the iPod came out it was too little (storage, interoperability) too late for me.
I wouldn’t read it that way. Jobs was good at noticing something would become possible 2-3 years before the rest of the industry. Flash-based players existed back then, and would have followed the trajectory the iPod jumped on a few years after it launched. The iPod interface was middling. (iTunes really, really sucked, but the device was nice)
Enabling podcasts was a big deal though. I’ll give them that.
iTunes was amazing. It’s UI was so successful it guided most of the Mac’s for next decade: Coverflow and Spotlight are direct descendants.
Every major OS has Spotlight-like UI these days. You can thank iTunes for the search-as-filter paradigm.
It also did everything you’d need regarding MP3s. You could rip CDs, organize and burn them, have the lyrics and album artwork show neatly while displaying a cool set of animated waveforms…
I miss it dearly. The fact that it became a behemoth and later Apple Music was a tragedy.
> Every major OS has Spotlight-like UI these days. You can thank iTunes for the search-as-filter paradigm.
I think your Apple bias is clouding your memory.
Apple certainly didn't invent the Spotlight UI. Quicksilver did it before on OS X, and my memory is hazy, but it also might've been inspired by another app.
iTunes also didn't invent the search-as-filter paradigm. I remember using something similar on foobar2000 in the early 2000s, and it might've been available even before in some Winamp plugins. Again, hazy memory, and it's difficult to track down these things now with any certainty.
I'm not arguing against your love for iTunes, but I think you're overstating its influence on software design.
And before Quicksilver there was LaunchBar, which pre-dates OS X having originally shipped for NeXT. I believe I starting using LaunchBar during the OS X public Beta, and I still use it.
You can download all of the old version of LaunchBar including for NeXT:
Apple didn't invent much. Quite a bit of their hardware design is inspired by dieter rams, a lot of their software is inspired by similar features from other operating systems. Most recently, the iOS widget system.
What apple does is perfect that design. iTunes didn't invent search-as-filter or the general UI layout, but it certainly perfected it.
Every public source tells the story that the iPod went from idea to introduction in 9 months. Jobs also never wanted iTunes on Windows. He was dragged kicking and screaming into doing it.
