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That last line about raising the bar... and raise it did! Apple often doesn't invent the whole thing, but definitely puts a usable version on the market. I reme

That last line about raising the bar... and raise it did! Apple often doesn't invent the whole thing, but definitely puts a usable version on the market. I remember the space between CD players and iPods having those rather crappy MP3 players, mini-disc players (which were actually quite good, but still used cartridges) and the really big laptop-HDD music players, and none of them were actually nice to use, or at least, not any 'nicer' than a portable CD player. This happened over and over again with the other stuff they made. It's not like there were no phones with touchscreens, or no tablets, or no smartwatches, TV media players etc. There always are/were/will be, but it's becoming something of a trend that Apple gets it's hands on one of those ideas and then puts a version on the market that actually works well for most people.

sdegutis 10y ago
Since then, competitors caught up, and Apple's quality of both software and hardware has started a steady decline.
- coldtea 10y ago
  Then again, people have said that since the first iPod. I need more 10 more hands to count all the "iPod killers" and "iPhone killers" that were stomped.
  - zitterbewegung 10y ago
    The real iPod killer was the iPhone . They disrupted themselves and usually companies don't want to do that .
    - TillE 10y ago
      I just wish they'd still make a decent iPod. All I want is a really light music player with physical buttons, like the first few generations of the iPod Nano. I'm aware this is probably a fairly small market, but it's gotta be bigger than whoever's buying the current pricey Nano with its crappy faux-iOS touch interface.
      - forgettableuser 10y ago
        I still use my classic iPod. I'm amazed the thing still works. I expected the hard disk to fail long ago. I had to replace the battery twice, but that's only a few dollars nowadays.
        godzulu 10y ago
        I still use my classic 5th gen with Wolfson DAC daily - it's plugged into my car. My hard drive did fail and I found a guy on eBay that took out my hard drive and replaced with 500gb ssd card. All lossless, all the time. It's awesome and extremely light too.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        I don't think many people still use anything other than their phones for portable music players. Doesn't make sense to carry another device. Heck, lots of people given up on compact cameras, where phones are still (and will be for the foreseeable future) subpar in quality, and they will carry another device just for music that doesn't really add anything?
        majewsky 10y ago
        I'm actually considering from time to time to get a separate portable music player, so that I can go to work without the phone and not get distracted by it all the time.
    - hulahoof 10y ago
      Considering what we ended up with, Apple would probably be in serious financial trouble if they didn't disrupt themselves.
  - paulmd 10y ago
    There have been worthy competitors but none with the finish quality and marketing budget of Apple. The iRiver MP3 players were fantastic throughout most of the 2000s (unfortunate choice of name, they existed pre-iPod). They were the player of choice for the technical crowd because they supported line-in recording, optical outputs, and OGG playback (which mattered a lot more when capacities were smaller). They had an average-quality interface, usable but not amazing. They were also one of the main bastions for the open-source Rockbox firmware, which supported a huge variety of codecs and WAV recording. Rockbox's appearance was utilitarian but it actually featured many great usability tweaks (exponential scrolling/FF/rewind, "car mode" that paused playback when power was lost, bookmarks, etc). They were an amazing player for someone who could do hardware mods. I kept mine going for a decade by swapping parts. I eventually used an adapter to plug in a CompactFlash card for a primitive SSD, and installed a high-capacity battery, which boosted the battery life to something absurd like 20 hours IIRC. On that note I still don't actually know anything that can touch the battery life of the early iRiver flash players (iFP series). We're talking 24 hours on a single AA. I've actually been looking for a replacement with those same characteristics (extreme battery life on a single disposable AA or AAA battery cell) and coming up empty. You would really think there'd be a successor using modern electronics but everyone has gone to integrated batteries. Anyone know of one? The Creative Zen Vision M was another really solid attempt. The scroll-strip was a worthy competitor for the (patented) Apple scrollwheel. Nice fit and finish, just couldn't make any waves in the market.
    - forgettableuser 10y ago
      I don't have anything against the Creative Zen, but it just looked like another weird/silly looking MP3 box that wasn't an iPod to my undiscerning eyes. I remember an awful product placement for the Zen on Smallville. There was some woman with a Zen. The Zen was supposed to be so alluring, it captured the eyes of the rich and powerful Lex Luthor and compelled him to approach the woman. For a series about an alien from another planet who is faster than a speeding bullet and so forth, I found it funny that this is the scene that broke the suspension of disbelief for me.
    - madeofpalk 10y ago
      To think the continuing success of Apple comes purely down to make I think is extremely condescending to a very wide range of consumers. Marketing can only get you in the door for you to buy the first product. You have to actually make something good in order to get customers to come back.
  - xanderstrike 10y ago
    I hate the term "iPod/iPhone killer," especially these days. Did the smartphone "kill" the iPod? Maybe kinda but people still use them. Did Android "kill" the iPhone because it's market share is 85%? Well, no, people still use iPhones and Apple is doing quite well. There's no one device that's going to kill any other, and there doesn't need to be. Multiple devices can exist in the same space.
- gumby 10y ago
  I think you mean Apple's quality of execution has gone up and down. There was no prelapsarian apple-of-perfection: they released amazing things and also released utter turds. I've been pretty much exclusively Apple for 20 years (laptops) and phones (since they shipped them), and the watch (vs other fitness trackers I've used). In the aggregate they haven't sucked as much as the alternatives. In other places (servers, wifi base stations, office software, music software) I've switched back and forth and currently don't think Apple is worth it. It doesn't have to be a religious issue. Oh and the original iPod? It was amazing!
  - mastazi 10y ago
    > (servers, wifi base stations, office software, music software) And how about workstations, high quality monitors, video and photo editing software? The thing is, while Apple's main focus was never spreadsheets or enterprise SW, it once produced the go-to computers for creative professionals (musicians, photographers, video makers, designers). I believe that Apple is losing its edge in that field, because they are exclusively focusing on consumer devices and software. The Mac Pro hasn't been updated in years; Aperture has been killed, Final Cut went from being a professional product to a "prosumer" one, Logic still seems to be doing OK but latest updates of Mac OS broke compatibility with many pieces of SW used by musicians (e.g. Ableton, NI Maschine etc), the list could go on...
    - bluedino 10y ago
      >> The Mac Pro hasn't been updated in years It's not like they were up to date before. Old video cards, USB 2.0... And it wasn't that great before those. The G5's were watercooled and would leak all over, not to mention slow, the G3 and G4 towers were upgraded so fast they obsoleted each other as soon as they came out, and didn't have support for all their features in OS 9.
    - fuzzywalrus 10y ago
      As unsexy as the Mac Pro line was, all they needed to do was keep the latest round of I/O (SATA 3, followed by USB 3, then USB 3.1, ThunderBolt) and just updated CPUs and GPUs without bothering to change the form factor. I'm still rolling a 2008 Mac Pro heavily updated. As someone who contracted for 3 Hollywood shows, I can tell you everyone jumped Final Cut Pro X for Avid or Premier Pro. It was sad. When they touted the Mac Pro 2013 as a computer you could carry to a set to do editing, a friend of my quipped "Clearly no one at Apple has any fucking idea how movies or TV show are made." That said, as long time digital musician 10.9+ hasn't been a problem for Maschine, Ableton, Cubase or Logic. I still have soft synths that are nearly 10 years old from the first Intel mac days working just fine...
paulmd 10y ago
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.
- largote 10y ago
  To be honest, the Nomad was fairly decent too, though the Creative brand couldn't command the premium price as well as Apple.
  - delinka 10y ago
    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... Good riddance.
    - throwaway7767 10y ago
      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.
  - huxley 10y ago
    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.
    - sesqu 10y ago
      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.
mountaineer22 10y ago
This was my first portable MP3 player: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_500 I still like the form factor and interface, but the storage was very limited. It could also be expanded with SmartMedia cards. Second one was this MP3 CD player: https://www.amazon.com/RioVolt-Portable-Player-Second-Anti-Shock/dp/B00005A1KZ https://www.amazon.com/RioVolt-Portable-Player-Second-Anti-S...
- JonnieCache 10y ago
  I had one of these badboys, which I filled with music from DC++ (those were the days.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series I wish I still had it so I could laugh at how big and heavy it is, with its 20gb spinning disk and those big blue rubber bumpers. Learned a lot putting different homebrew firmwares on it. Also big shoutout to the Cowon iAudio series. Those things did sterling service for years. Just thinking of the brightly coloured menus is sending me back to my teenage days.
  - SamBam 10y ago
    Oh man, I actually forgot I owned that. How could I forget? Those bumpers were so big and blue.
  - throwaway7767 10y ago
    The Archos Jukebox was the player that introduced me to Rockbox[0]. Great player for the time, but as you said it was huge. I think I even put in a larger drive at some point. These days I run rockbox on an iPod. The hardware is better but rockbox is still IMHO the best interface for a portable music player. [0] http://www.rockbox.org http://www.rockbox.org
- Alex3917 10y ago
  I got a free Rio 500 from the website PointClick during the height of .com insanity. That thing was easily one of the greatest consumer electronics products of all time. Does anyone know the inside story of what ever happened to that product line? I read that Diamond sold the assets, but didn't find anything beyond that. (Though I would note that their earlier model, the PMP300, looks suspiciously like the first iPod.)
peterkshultz 10y ago
Reminds me of the fast follower strategy: https://hbr.org/2012/06/first-mover-or-fast-follower https://hbr.org/2012/06/first-mover-or-fast-follower
agumonkey 10y ago
Come on, MDs came out in late 1992. Let that sink in for a moment.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
LargeCompanies 10y ago
Yes all products that raised the bar and made Apple what it's become were under Job's rule. Tim Cook is a money guy only and as a long time apple fan and Siri user I'm bored and disappointed! Google Now is amazing and I'm longing for something more exciting then my recently bought iPhone 7. The Pixel looks very interesting but it's only on Verizon.
- akmiller 10y ago
  It's not only on Verizon. Verizon is the only carrier that sells it at the store.
- cbhl 10y ago
  If you want to buy a Pixel in-store, then yes, it's only on Verizon. If you buy one from the Google Store, it's unlocked, and it should work on most major US carriers. (See "Channels" under "Specs & More": https://store.google.com/product/pixel_phone https://store.google.com/product/pixel_phone) Disclaimer: I work at YouTube, which is a part of Google.
- acdha 10y ago
  Steve Jobs deserves a great deal of respect but I do think you're forgetting the less great parts. They had lackluster updates, products which went years too long without a meaningful update (e.g. all laptops for the half decade prior to the Intel switch), the iTunes UI started getting worse in every release around the early 2000s, until a few years ago their attitude about security was borderline negligence, they shamelessly ignored long-standing customers who kept them alive through the dark years[1], and every cloud service they offered until the last year or two was a user-hostile disaster. The key, of course, is that a few big wins make up for a lot of that but the other side of that lesson is that most people will do better with consistent solid execution rather than spreading themselves too thin trying for a huge win. Apple could easily have been Palm or SGI if one of those long-shots hadn't paid off. 1. Our Apple higher-ed rep used to respond to critical bug reports by asking how many Macs we couldn't purchase due to that bug.
LargeCompanies 10y ago
Yes all products that raised the bar and made Apple what it's become were under Job's rule. Tim Cook is a money guy only and as a long time apple fan and Siri user I'm bored and disappointed! Google Now is amazing and I'm longing for something better then by recently bought iPhone 7. The pixel looks very interesting but it's only on Verizon.
hoorayimhelping 10y ago
>This happened over and over again with the other stuff they made. I heard someone (maybe Jon Gruber) once say that Apple doesn't invent sliced bread, or cold cuts, or bib lettuce or condiments. They invent the sandwich.
tw04 10y ago
I still am honestly dumbfounded as to how the ipod won. I bought one of the originals. After having 3 of them die in less than 6 months I finally sold the 4th on ebay. Everytime it died I had to pay circuit city $100 to "renew" the warranty. Best I can tell the vibration from having it in my pocket while walking to class was killing the shit hard drives they used in the first gen. I then bought a panasonic sd80 music player. Used sdcards to store music - I STILL have that panasonic player. I literally had it fly off my arm and bounce off a wall while doing sprints in a gym. Plugged it in and it was still playing. It still plays more formats in higher quality than the original iPod. Congrats on the marketing Apple, it definitely wasn't about having a superior product. I wish it had won out, it was superior in every way. http://www.qvc.com/Panasonic-SV-SD80-e-Wear-Micro-MP3-Player.product.E115590.html http://www.qvc.com/Panasonic-SV-SD80-e-Wear-Micro-MP3-Player...
- gf263 10y ago
  _Every way_?
  - tw04 10y ago
    Literally every way. The only downside was having to use rhapsody to load music - but I can just barely call that a downside since there was no supported method to load music onto an iPod on Windows at that point. So you either bought a mac, or used third party software and hoped they stayed in front of the Apple DRM police.
- nardi 10y ago
  > I wish it had won out, it was superior in every way Uh, a 64MB SD card is a lot smaller than a 5GB hard drive. The iPod stored 93x more songs. If the SV-SD80 had been able to store 1000 songs instead of ~11 songs, then navigating them would not have worked at all. The iPod was in an entirely different market.
  - tw04 10y ago
    128MB cards were out the same year the ipod was. They also cost about $30. I'll take two CDs per card over an iPod that dies if you breath on it wrong any day of the week.
jimbokun 10y ago
"Apple often doesn't invent the whole thing, but definitely puts a usable version on the market." A common criticism of Apple is they just take technology that is most of the way there, then just make it usable. Of course, making it usable is often the hardest part and adds the most value for the consumer.
- beefsack 10y ago
  Something needs to exist before you can improve it. Continuing along those lines, the initial innovation to bring unique products to market is at least as important as polishing it.
  - nardi 10y ago
    In this case, what was the initial innovation that was at least as important as the iPod? Who made it?
    - dewitt 10y ago
      MP3 encoding (Fraunhofer Institute) and the Arcos Jukebox (Arcos). Both paved the technical way for the huge usability and ergonomic improvements offered by the iPod. Edit: And HDD density / price per MB reaching a point where storing several dozen MP3s was noticeably more convenient than swapping CDs.
      - nardi 10y ago
        MP3, definitely; that's a great pick. But do you really think using a hard drive instead of flash memory was a huge innovative leap? They didn't invent the hard drive. Both forms of storage existed at the time, and anyone could have picked one over the other.
        ghaff 10y ago
        The iPod hit the market pretty much together with 1.8" HDDs which proved to be a pretty nice sweet spot for a while. Flash costs became pretty unattractive in comparison for desirable capacities while larger drives led to clunky devices. Not sure how one counts innovative but Apple chose a good horse to ride for storage that led to it being in an increasingly enviable position among MP3 players. (Which Apple parlayed into popular flash players and then the iPhone.)
jusben1369 10y ago
Yes I think this is why the iWatch has largely been a failure. There wasn't really a watch out there that was getting real traction despite itself so that apple could come along and add the missing ingredients and "boom"! It's the downside of when there is so much pressure to have "another hit" but your skill isn't creating something out of thin air but rather taking something that has real upside if you can get all the pieces of the ecosystem (hw/sw/contentproviders) to hum together.
Hondor 10y ago
Iphones and Macs don't work well for most people. Apple only has a 10-20% share of the global smartphone market and 7% of the PC market. I don't think it's very special to make a good product that's expensive. Competitors satisfy more people by making a still-pretty-good product that's less expensive.
lmm 10y ago
The big innovation was often the willingness to charge more. When Apple came out with the original iphone it was $600 at a time when high-end phones were $200. (And it couldn't even run programs! What I really don't get is why Sharp/HP/etc. never made a PocketPC that had phone functionality built in). Many people thought the market that would pay $600 for a phone didn't exist. I guess that's part of the power of being a recognized luxury brand - you can sell a product that's twice the cost of the alternatives, but people will be ok with buying it, because they'll have enough faith in you to deliver something that's worth that much.
- mipoch 10y ago
  I am sorry but you're wrong. Nokia's high-end phones were costing similar money: " The launch price of the N95 was around €550 (about US$730, GB£370)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95
  - dchest 10y ago
    Indeed, plus: What I really don't get is why Sharp/HP/etc. never made a PocketPC that had phone functionality built in) There were many PocketPC-based smartphones (PDA-phones), even from HP and Sharp. Also, many inexpensive phones could run third-party apps, albeit crappy Java ME-based.
    - lmm 10y ago
      > There were many PocketPC-based smartphones (PDA-phones), even from HP and Sharp. Really? I remember spending quite a while comparing specs before getting an ASUS A730W. I remember a few interesting-sounding Zauruses (Zaurodes?) that were never released in the west, but nothing I could actually buy. > Also, many inexpensive phones could run third-party apps, albeit crappy Java ME-based. True - but they really were crappy. Whereas my PDA ran real programs - it was relatively easy to port and build existing C++ code (the UI toolkit was different, but all UI toolkits were different in those days).
      - 10y ago
ralfd 10y ago
On second "Lord of the Rings" movie, "The Two Towers" extended edition DVD, is a making of documentary. Peter Jackson explains that internet connection in New Zealand was so slow, that the special effects artists used their iPods to copy data on it to work at home in London.
gens 10y ago
The thing that put apple products above and beyond other products that were the same was marketing. Apple is great at creating hype. Personally i will never buy an apple product. Mostly because of the insane prices but partially out of principal and practicality (as their products are in their own world).

sdegutis 10y ago

Since then, competitors caught up, and Apple's quality of both software and hardware has started a steady decline.

coldtea 10y ago
Then again, people have said that since the first iPod. I need more 10 more hands to count all the "iPod killers" and "iPhone killers" that were stomped.
- zitterbewegung 10y ago
  The real iPod killer was the iPhone . They disrupted themselves and usually companies don't want to do that .
  - TillE 10y ago
    I just wish they'd still make a decent iPod. All I want is a really light music player with physical buttons, like the first few generations of the iPod Nano. I'm aware this is probably a fairly small market, but it's gotta be bigger than whoever's buying the current pricey Nano with its crappy faux-iOS touch interface.
    - forgettableuser 10y ago
      I still use my classic iPod. I'm amazed the thing still works. I expected the hard disk to fail long ago. I had to replace the battery twice, but that's only a few dollars nowadays.
      - godzulu 10y ago
        I still use my classic 5th gen with Wolfson DAC daily - it's plugged into my car. My hard drive did fail and I found a guy on eBay that took out my hard drive and replaced with 500gb ssd card. All lossless, all the time. It's awesome and extremely light too.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      I don't think many people still use anything other than their phones for portable music players. Doesn't make sense to carry another device. Heck, lots of people given up on compact cameras, where phones are still (and will be for the foreseeable future) subpar in quality, and they will carry another device just for music that doesn't really add anything?
      - majewsky 10y ago
        I'm actually considering from time to time to get a separate portable music player, so that I can go to work without the phone and not get distracted by it all the time.
  - hulahoof 10y ago
    Considering what we ended up with, Apple would probably be in serious financial trouble if they didn't disrupt themselves.
- paulmd 10y ago
  There have been worthy competitors but none with the finish quality and marketing budget of Apple. The iRiver MP3 players were fantastic throughout most of the 2000s (unfortunate choice of name, they existed pre-iPod). They were the player of choice for the technical crowd because they supported line-in recording, optical outputs, and OGG playback (which mattered a lot more when capacities were smaller). They had an average-quality interface, usable but not amazing. They were also one of the main bastions for the open-source Rockbox firmware, which supported a huge variety of codecs and WAV recording. Rockbox's appearance was utilitarian but it actually featured many great usability tweaks (exponential scrolling/FF/rewind, "car mode" that paused playback when power was lost, bookmarks, etc). They were an amazing player for someone who could do hardware mods. I kept mine going for a decade by swapping parts. I eventually used an adapter to plug in a CompactFlash card for a primitive SSD, and installed a high-capacity battery, which boosted the battery life to something absurd like 20 hours IIRC. On that note I still don't actually know anything that can touch the battery life of the early iRiver flash players (iFP series). We're talking 24 hours on a single AA. I've actually been looking for a replacement with those same characteristics (extreme battery life on a single disposable AA or AAA battery cell) and coming up empty. You would really think there'd be a successor using modern electronics but everyone has gone to integrated batteries. Anyone know of one? The Creative Zen Vision M was another really solid attempt. The scroll-strip was a worthy competitor for the (patented) Apple scrollwheel. Nice fit and finish, just couldn't make any waves in the market.
  - forgettableuser 10y ago
    I don't have anything against the Creative Zen, but it just looked like another weird/silly looking MP3 box that wasn't an iPod to my undiscerning eyes. I remember an awful product placement for the Zen on Smallville. There was some woman with a Zen. The Zen was supposed to be so alluring, it captured the eyes of the rich and powerful Lex Luthor and compelled him to approach the woman. For a series about an alien from another planet who is faster than a speeding bullet and so forth, I found it funny that this is the scene that broke the suspension of disbelief for me.
  - madeofpalk 10y ago
    To think the continuing success of Apple comes purely down to make I think is extremely condescending to a very wide range of consumers. Marketing can only get you in the door for you to buy the first product. You have to actually make something good in order to get customers to come back.
- xanderstrike 10y ago
  I hate the term "iPod/iPhone killer," especially these days. Did the smartphone "kill" the iPod? Maybe kinda but people still use them. Did Android "kill" the iPhone because it's market share is 85%? Well, no, people still use iPhones and Apple is doing quite well. There's no one device that's going to kill any other, and there doesn't need to be. Multiple devices can exist in the same space.
gumby 10y ago
I think you mean Apple's quality of execution has gone up and down. There was no prelapsarian apple-of-perfection: they released amazing things and also released utter turds. I've been pretty much exclusively Apple for 20 years (laptops) and phones (since they shipped them), and the watch (vs other fitness trackers I've used). In the aggregate they haven't sucked as much as the alternatives. In other places (servers, wifi base stations, office software, music software) I've switched back and forth and currently don't think Apple is worth it. It doesn't have to be a religious issue. Oh and the original iPod? It was amazing!
- mastazi 10y ago
  > (servers, wifi base stations, office software, music software) And how about workstations, high quality monitors, video and photo editing software? The thing is, while Apple's main focus was never spreadsheets or enterprise SW, it once produced the go-to computers for creative professionals (musicians, photographers, video makers, designers). I believe that Apple is losing its edge in that field, because they are exclusively focusing on consumer devices and software. The Mac Pro hasn't been updated in years; Aperture has been killed, Final Cut went from being a professional product to a "prosumer" one, Logic still seems to be doing OK but latest updates of Mac OS broke compatibility with many pieces of SW used by musicians (e.g. Ableton, NI Maschine etc), the list could go on...
  - bluedino 10y ago
    >> The Mac Pro hasn't been updated in years It's not like they were up to date before. Old video cards, USB 2.0... And it wasn't that great before those. The G5's were watercooled and would leak all over, not to mention slow, the G3 and G4 towers were upgraded so fast they obsoleted each other as soon as they came out, and didn't have support for all their features in OS 9.
  - fuzzywalrus 10y ago
    As unsexy as the Mac Pro line was, all they needed to do was keep the latest round of I/O (SATA 3, followed by USB 3, then USB 3.1, ThunderBolt) and just updated CPUs and GPUs without bothering to change the form factor. I'm still rolling a 2008 Mac Pro heavily updated. As someone who contracted for 3 Hollywood shows, I can tell you everyone jumped Final Cut Pro X for Avid or Premier Pro. It was sad. When they touted the Mac Pro 2013 as a computer you could carry to a set to do editing, a friend of my quipped "Clearly no one at Apple has any fucking idea how movies or TV show are made." That said, as long time digital musician 10.9+ hasn't been a problem for Maschine, Ableton, Cubase or Logic. I still have soft synths that are nearly 10 years old from the first Intel mac days working just fine...

paulmd 10y ago

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.

largote 10y ago
To be honest, the Nomad was fairly decent too, though the Creative brand couldn't command the premium price as well as Apple.
- delinka 10y ago
  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... Good riddance.
  - throwaway7767 10y ago
    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.
- huxley 10y ago
  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.
  - sesqu 10y ago
    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.

mountaineer22 10y ago

This was my first portable MP3 player: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_500 I still like the form factor and interface, but the storage was very limited. It could also be expanded with SmartMedia cards. Second one was this MP3 CD player: https://www.amazon.com/RioVolt-Portable-Player-Second-Anti-Shock/dp/B00005A1KZ https://www.amazon.com/RioVolt-Portable-Player-Second-Anti-S...

JonnieCache 10y ago
I had one of these badboys, which I filled with music from DC++ (those were the days.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series I wish I still had it so I could laugh at how big and heavy it is, with its 20gb spinning disk and those big blue rubber bumpers. Learned a lot putting different homebrew firmwares on it. Also big shoutout to the Cowon iAudio series. Those things did sterling service for years. Just thinking of the brightly coloured menus is sending me back to my teenage days.
- SamBam 10y ago
  Oh man, I actually forgot I owned that. How could I forget? Those bumpers were so big and blue.
- throwaway7767 10y ago
  The Archos Jukebox was the player that introduced me to Rockbox[0]. Great player for the time, but as you said it was huge. I think I even put in a larger drive at some point. These days I run rockbox on an iPod. The hardware is better but rockbox is still IMHO the best interface for a portable music player. [0] http://www.rockbox.org http://www.rockbox.org
Alex3917 10y ago
I got a free Rio 500 from the website PointClick during the height of .com insanity. That thing was easily one of the greatest consumer electronics products of all time. Does anyone know the inside story of what ever happened to that product line? I read that Diamond sold the assets, but didn't find anything beyond that. (Though I would note that their earlier model, the PMP300, looks suspiciously like the first iPod.)

peterkshultz 10y ago

Reminds me of the fast follower strategy: https://hbr.org/2012/06/first-mover-or-fast-follower https://hbr.org/2012/06/first-mover-or-fast-follower

agumonkey 10y ago

Come on, MDs came out in late 1992. Let that sink in for a moment.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

LargeCompanies 10y ago

Yes all products that raised the bar and made Apple what it's become were under Job's rule. Tim Cook is a money guy only and as a long time apple fan and Siri user I'm bored and disappointed! Google Now is amazing and I'm longing for something more exciting then my recently bought iPhone 7. The Pixel looks very interesting but it's only on Verizon.

akmiller 10y ago
It's not only on Verizon. Verizon is the only carrier that sells it at the store.
cbhl 10y ago
If you want to buy a Pixel in-store, then yes, it's only on Verizon. If you buy one from the Google Store, it's unlocked, and it should work on most major US carriers. (See "Channels" under "Specs & More": https://store.google.com/product/pixel_phone https://store.google.com/product/pixel_phone) Disclaimer: I work at YouTube, which is a part of Google.
acdha 10y ago
Steve Jobs deserves a great deal of respect but I do think you're forgetting the less great parts. They had lackluster updates, products which went years too long without a meaningful update (e.g. all laptops for the half decade prior to the Intel switch), the iTunes UI started getting worse in every release around the early 2000s, until a few years ago their attitude about security was borderline negligence, they shamelessly ignored long-standing customers who kept them alive through the dark years[1], and every cloud service they offered until the last year or two was a user-hostile disaster. The key, of course, is that a few big wins make up for a lot of that but the other side of that lesson is that most people will do better with consistent solid execution rather than spreading themselves too thin trying for a huge win. Apple could easily have been Palm or SGI if one of those long-shots hadn't paid off. 1. Our Apple higher-ed rep used to respond to critical bug reports by asking how many Macs we couldn't purchase due to that bug.

LargeCompanies 10y ago

Yes all products that raised the bar and made Apple what it's become were under Job's rule. Tim Cook is a money guy only and as a long time apple fan and Siri user I'm bored and disappointed! Google Now is amazing and I'm longing for something better then by recently bought iPhone 7. The pixel looks very interesting but it's only on Verizon.

hoorayimhelping 10y ago

>This happened over and over again with the other stuff they made. I heard someone (maybe Jon Gruber) once say that Apple doesn't invent sliced bread, or cold cuts, or bib lettuce or condiments. They invent the sandwich.

tw04 10y ago

I still am honestly dumbfounded as to how the ipod won. I bought one of the originals. After having 3 of them die in less than 6 months I finally sold the 4th on ebay. Everytime it died I had to pay circuit city $100 to "renew" the warranty. Best I can tell the vibration from having it in my pocket while walking to class was killing the shit hard drives they used in the first gen. I then bought a panasonic sd80 music player. Used sdcards to store music - I STILL have that panasonic player. I literally had it fly off my arm and bounce off a wall while doing sprints in a gym. Plugged it in and it was still playing. It still plays more formats in higher quality than the original iPod. Congrats on the marketing Apple, it definitely wasn't about having a superior product. I wish it had won out, it was superior in every way. http://www.qvc.com/Panasonic-SV-SD80-e-Wear-Micro-MP3-Player.product.E115590.html http://www.qvc.com/Panasonic-SV-SD80-e-Wear-Micro-MP3-Player...

gf263 10y ago
_Every way_?
- tw04 10y ago
  Literally every way. The only downside was having to use rhapsody to load music - but I can just barely call that a downside since there was no supported method to load music onto an iPod on Windows at that point. So you either bought a mac, or used third party software and hoped they stayed in front of the Apple DRM police.
nardi 10y ago
> I wish it had won out, it was superior in every way Uh, a 64MB SD card is a lot smaller than a 5GB hard drive. The iPod stored 93x more songs. If the SV-SD80 had been able to store 1000 songs instead of ~11 songs, then navigating them would not have worked at all. The iPod was in an entirely different market.
- tw04 10y ago
  128MB cards were out the same year the ipod was. They also cost about $30. I'll take two CDs per card over an iPod that dies if you breath on it wrong any day of the week.

jimbokun 10y ago

"Apple often doesn't invent the whole thing, but definitely puts a usable version on the market." A common criticism of Apple is they just take technology that is most of the way there, then just make it usable. Of course, making it usable is often the hardest part and adds the most value for the consumer.

beefsack 10y ago
Something needs to exist before you can improve it. Continuing along those lines, the initial innovation to bring unique products to market is at least as important as polishing it.
- nardi 10y ago
  In this case, what was the initial innovation that was at least as important as the iPod? Who made it?
  - dewitt 10y ago
    MP3 encoding (Fraunhofer Institute) and the Arcos Jukebox (Arcos). Both paved the technical way for the huge usability and ergonomic improvements offered by the iPod. Edit: And HDD density / price per MB reaching a point where storing several dozen MP3s was noticeably more convenient than swapping CDs.
    - nardi 10y ago
      MP3, definitely; that's a great pick. But do you really think using a hard drive instead of flash memory was a huge innovative leap? They didn't invent the hard drive. Both forms of storage existed at the time, and anyone could have picked one over the other.
      - ghaff 10y ago
        The iPod hit the market pretty much together with 1.8" HDDs which proved to be a pretty nice sweet spot for a while. Flash costs became pretty unattractive in comparison for desirable capacities while larger drives led to clunky devices. Not sure how one counts innovative but Apple chose a good horse to ride for storage that led to it being in an increasingly enviable position among MP3 players. (Which Apple parlayed into popular flash players and then the iPhone.)

jusben1369 10y ago

Yes I think this is why the iWatch has largely been a failure. There wasn't really a watch out there that was getting real traction despite itself so that apple could come along and add the missing ingredients and "boom"! It's the downside of when there is so much pressure to have "another hit" but your skill isn't creating something out of thin air but rather taking something that has real upside if you can get all the pieces of the ecosystem (hw/sw/contentproviders) to hum together.

Hondor 10y ago

Iphones and Macs don't work well for most people. Apple only has a 10-20% share of the global smartphone market and 7% of the PC market. I don't think it's very special to make a good product that's expensive. Competitors satisfy more people by making a still-pretty-good product that's less expensive.

lmm 10y ago

The big innovation was often the willingness to charge more. When Apple came out with the original iphone it was $600 at a time when high-end phones were $200. (And it couldn't even run programs! What I really don't get is why Sharp/HP/etc. never made a PocketPC that had phone functionality built in). Many people thought the market that would pay $600 for a phone didn't exist. I guess that's part of the power of being a recognized luxury brand - you can sell a product that's twice the cost of the alternatives, but people will be ok with buying it, because they'll have enough faith in you to deliver something that's worth that much.

mipoch 10y ago
I am sorry but you're wrong. Nokia's high-end phones were costing similar money: " The launch price of the N95 was around €550 (about US$730, GB£370)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N95
- dchest 10y ago
  Indeed, plus: What I really don't get is why Sharp/HP/etc. never made a PocketPC that had phone functionality built in) There were many PocketPC-based smartphones (PDA-phones), even from HP and Sharp. Also, many inexpensive phones could run third-party apps, albeit crappy Java ME-based.
  - lmm 10y ago
    > There were many PocketPC-based smartphones (PDA-phones), even from HP and Sharp. Really? I remember spending quite a while comparing specs before getting an ASUS A730W. I remember a few interesting-sounding Zauruses (Zaurodes?) that were never released in the west, but nothing I could actually buy. > Also, many inexpensive phones could run third-party apps, albeit crappy Java ME-based. True - but they really were crappy. Whereas my PDA ran real programs - it was relatively easy to port and build existing C++ code (the UI toolkit was different, but all UI toolkits were different in those days).
    - 10y ago

ralfd 10y ago

On second "Lord of the Rings" movie, "The Two Towers" extended edition DVD, is a making of documentary. Peter Jackson explains that internet connection in New Zealand was so slow, that the special effects artists used their iPods to copy data on it to work at home in London.

gens 10y ago

The thing that put apple products above and beyond other products that were the same was marketing. Apple is great at creating hype. Personally i will never buy an apple product. Mostly because of the insane prices but partially out of principal and practicality (as their products are in their own world).