5 ms·

If you want to see short sightedness of nerd experts in action, look no further than this gem here https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i

If you want to see short sightedness of nerd experts in action, look no further than this gem here https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ipod https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

icebraining 10y ago
Just a small reminder that personal opinions (like CmdrTaco's comments) are not the same as sales forecasts. To many of us, it was lame.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >To many of us, it was lame. Compared to what existing at the time device? I had Nomad like devices and they were crap.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    Compared to any device that had a USB port and hence actually worked with our PCs.
    - honkhonkpants 10y ago
      See, that's just the thing right there. Jobs wanted to market a great product and was in no way concerned that some people might not be able to use it, because expanding the product to those users would compromise the greatness of the product. USB ports with comparable speeds to FireWire had only just been released on PCs when the iPod came to market, and charging a battery over USB was at that time just an abuse of the specification, whereas FireWire was designed from the beginning to provide 15W nominally and up to 45W tolerated. USB did not reach FireWire levels of battery charging ability until 2012!
      - FabHK 10y ago
        Exactly. Firewire = charging + super speed. iTunes was Mac only at the time, for (relatively) easy management and syncing of your music.
      - MagnumOpus 10y ago
        Yes, Jobs was short-sighted and made a bad business decision by not supporting 95%+ of his potential customer base. He subsequently did a 180 on this decision - Gen 3 introduced USB syncing, Gen 4 introduced USB charging, Gen 5 dropped Firewire syncing - and hey presto, the iPod started selling more than 5 million units a year, started being profitable and swallowed the entire competition.
        honkhonkpants 10y ago
        You're applying your own success criteria to someone else's project.
    - xenadu02 10y ago
      > Compared to any device that had a USB port and hence actually worked with our PCs USB 2 wasn't even ratified until the end of 2001 after the original iPod's introduction. Do you know how long it would have taken to sync 1000 songs over USB 1.0? 1000 * 5MB/song (avg) / 1.25MB/sec = 4000 seconds or over an hour. Firewire was able to stream data at disk write speed which would have been anywhere from 5-20MB/sec.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        Who cared? It's not like I listened to a thousand songs every day and had to write a thousand more every night. It took an hour the first time to fill it up, then I'd only replace an album or two at a time.
  - recursive 10y ago
    To anything that didn't require itunes.
  - OSButler 10y ago
    I owned a Nomad Jukebox around the time of the original ipod release and couldn't understand the hype around the ipod, as it was lacking in functionality, specs, and especially usability compared to the nomad. CmdrTaco's quote gets mentioned a few times in this thread, but I shared his opinion at the time, as it just seemed so obvious that the ipod was lacking when compared to other devices on the market. However, it's actually kind of interesting looking back at such events, since they seemed to be so trivial at the time but are now touted as turning points in the industry. Makes one wonder what other "hits" I'll miss out on in the future.
    - honkhonkpants 10y ago
      A lot of people have said this over the years and I still just can't fathom it. The iPod was much smaller than the Creative Nomad of that time, which had a 2.5" HDD and intentionally mimicked the size and shape of a Sony Discman. The iPod had more than double the battery life of the Nomad, which did not charge its batteries from the USB port, necessitating the carriage of the power brick. As for usability the Nomad had a quirk where its user interface would stop responding due to low power supply, but the player would not stop playing, leading to the somewhat hilarious but also very much not funny situation of not being able to stop the music.
      - rconti 10y ago
        I always thought the sync-cable-doubles-as-power-cable thing was so ingenious. Could you charge any product over USB at the time? I don't remember anyone doing this before Apple did, and it helped that the FW400 cables were the same on both ends. And on top of that, all of the chargers were modular in the way the Macbook chargers still are today; you could swap on the "long cable" end in place of the flip-out prongs, or use the non-North America travel kit tips with any of their chargers as well. I was sad the day the iPhone started shipping with just a simple USB->power brick with the modularity removed.
      - OSButler 10y ago
        This is anecdotal, but maybe it'll explain a bit more where I was coming from in regards to my reaction to the initial ipod reveal. Back then, my music player adaption went from CD Player, CD Player with MP3 CD support, to Nomad Jukebox 3. Size was not an issue at the time, since I was used to the CD player size and was more looking for ways to get rid of all the CDs I had to keep bringing with me. The Jukebox 3 had the largest HDD at the time, as far as I recall, and allowed me to put my full CD collection on it at that time already. It was also running on a larger battery brick and had an additional slot for another battery to extend its playtime. The batteries were charged in an external charger, so that you could simply swap out the batteries and keep on taking the player with you. It also came with a remote control, which was more of a gimmick, but came in handy every once in a while. The UI allowed browsing through a scroll wheel on its side and you could access the music through various ways (as far as I recall: genre, artist, album, song, and playlist). Especially the scroll wheel was so easy to use compared to the click wheel on the ipod, which appeared to be more gimmicky than useful at the time. Of course, by now things have changed and I love the fact that I can put all that music on my phone and being able to connect it to all the different devices (bluetooth & audio jack speakers/headphones), so that I wouldn't want to take a dedicated MP3 player, especially the size of the Jukebox 3, with me anymore. However, at the time of the original ipod release the lack of HDD size in favour of hardware size didn't make any sense to me and I still catch myself thinking like that during some of the Apple release events since, where it sometimes seems like they're taking one step forward and multiple steps back - will be interesting to see what happens during the upcoming Macbook event.
  - eli 10y ago
    I had an iRiver player I loved. But, anyway, did you already own a Mac with FireWire then? Were you willing to buy one just to be able to use an iPod with it?
    - coldtea 10y ago
      I first bought the 2nd gen iPod, and I didn't have a Mac, but I had a PC laptop with a program called Musicmatch Jukebox (IIRC) for syncing.
  - pragmar 10y ago
    Archos Jukebox was pretty great--had SPDIF IO and an accessible 2.5" hard drive (upgradable). Wasn't pretty, but in terms of functionality, it was amazing for its time. Rockbox firmware was icing on the cake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series
  - xenadu02 10y ago
    > I had Nomad like devices and they were crap. Tell me about it. I also used Windows Mobile phones (and PocketPC before that). The iPhone was revolutionary compared to every other product on the market at the time. Even Android was just a Blackberry clone at the time. Yet I've seen people argue right here on HN that there was nothing special about the original iPhone. Apple is always beleaguered. Just like everything is 100% obvious in hindsight. DropBox/Box is just rsync. Instacart is just paying someone to shop for you. Uber is just a taxi service.
romanhn 10y ago
A similar thread here: http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.500/ http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.50.... I have to say, I felt pretty much the same way at the time...
- dougmwne 10y ago
  It's so easy to collectively re-write history. Archived gems like this make it a little harder. The iPod ended as a cultural phenomenon, but it definitely didn't start that way. You would have to have been truly prescient to have explained at the time why Apple was on the right track.

icebraining 10y ago

Just a small reminder that personal opinions (like CmdrTaco's comments) are not the same as sales forecasts. To many of us, it was lame.

coldtea 10y ago
>To many of us, it was lame. Compared to what existing at the time device? I had Nomad like devices and they were crap.
- icebraining 10y ago
  Compared to any device that had a USB port and hence actually worked with our PCs.
  - honkhonkpants 10y ago
    See, that's just the thing right there. Jobs wanted to market a great product and was in no way concerned that some people might not be able to use it, because expanding the product to those users would compromise the greatness of the product. USB ports with comparable speeds to FireWire had only just been released on PCs when the iPod came to market, and charging a battery over USB was at that time just an abuse of the specification, whereas FireWire was designed from the beginning to provide 15W nominally and up to 45W tolerated. USB did not reach FireWire levels of battery charging ability until 2012!
    - FabHK 10y ago
      Exactly. Firewire = charging + super speed. iTunes was Mac only at the time, for (relatively) easy management and syncing of your music.
    - MagnumOpus 10y ago
      Yes, Jobs was short-sighted and made a bad business decision by not supporting 95%+ of his potential customer base. He subsequently did a 180 on this decision - Gen 3 introduced USB syncing, Gen 4 introduced USB charging, Gen 5 dropped Firewire syncing - and hey presto, the iPod started selling more than 5 million units a year, started being profitable and swallowed the entire competition.
      - honkhonkpants 10y ago
        You're applying your own success criteria to someone else's project.
  - xenadu02 10y ago
    > Compared to any device that had a USB port and hence actually worked with our PCs USB 2 wasn't even ratified until the end of 2001 after the original iPod's introduction. Do you know how long it would have taken to sync 1000 songs over USB 1.0? 1000 * 5MB/song (avg) / 1.25MB/sec = 4000 seconds or over an hour. Firewire was able to stream data at disk write speed which would have been anywhere from 5-20MB/sec.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      Who cared? It's not like I listened to a thousand songs every day and had to write a thousand more every night. It took an hour the first time to fill it up, then I'd only replace an album or two at a time.
- recursive 10y ago
  To anything that didn't require itunes.
- OSButler 10y ago
  I owned a Nomad Jukebox around the time of the original ipod release and couldn't understand the hype around the ipod, as it was lacking in functionality, specs, and especially usability compared to the nomad. CmdrTaco's quote gets mentioned a few times in this thread, but I shared his opinion at the time, as it just seemed so obvious that the ipod was lacking when compared to other devices on the market. However, it's actually kind of interesting looking back at such events, since they seemed to be so trivial at the time but are now touted as turning points in the industry. Makes one wonder what other "hits" I'll miss out on in the future.
  - honkhonkpants 10y ago
    A lot of people have said this over the years and I still just can't fathom it. The iPod was much smaller than the Creative Nomad of that time, which had a 2.5" HDD and intentionally mimicked the size and shape of a Sony Discman. The iPod had more than double the battery life of the Nomad, which did not charge its batteries from the USB port, necessitating the carriage of the power brick. As for usability the Nomad had a quirk where its user interface would stop responding due to low power supply, but the player would not stop playing, leading to the somewhat hilarious but also very much not funny situation of not being able to stop the music.
    - rconti 10y ago
      I always thought the sync-cable-doubles-as-power-cable thing was so ingenious. Could you charge any product over USB at the time? I don't remember anyone doing this before Apple did, and it helped that the FW400 cables were the same on both ends. And on top of that, all of the chargers were modular in the way the Macbook chargers still are today; you could swap on the "long cable" end in place of the flip-out prongs, or use the non-North America travel kit tips with any of their chargers as well. I was sad the day the iPhone started shipping with just a simple USB->power brick with the modularity removed.
    - OSButler 10y ago
      This is anecdotal, but maybe it'll explain a bit more where I was coming from in regards to my reaction to the initial ipod reveal. Back then, my music player adaption went from CD Player, CD Player with MP3 CD support, to Nomad Jukebox 3. Size was not an issue at the time, since I was used to the CD player size and was more looking for ways to get rid of all the CDs I had to keep bringing with me. The Jukebox 3 had the largest HDD at the time, as far as I recall, and allowed me to put my full CD collection on it at that time already. It was also running on a larger battery brick and had an additional slot for another battery to extend its playtime. The batteries were charged in an external charger, so that you could simply swap out the batteries and keep on taking the player with you. It also came with a remote control, which was more of a gimmick, but came in handy every once in a while. The UI allowed browsing through a scroll wheel on its side and you could access the music through various ways (as far as I recall: genre, artist, album, song, and playlist). Especially the scroll wheel was so easy to use compared to the click wheel on the ipod, which appeared to be more gimmicky than useful at the time. Of course, by now things have changed and I love the fact that I can put all that music on my phone and being able to connect it to all the different devices (bluetooth & audio jack speakers/headphones), so that I wouldn't want to take a dedicated MP3 player, especially the size of the Jukebox 3, with me anymore. However, at the time of the original ipod release the lack of HDD size in favour of hardware size didn't make any sense to me and I still catch myself thinking like that during some of the Apple release events since, where it sometimes seems like they're taking one step forward and multiple steps back - will be interesting to see what happens during the upcoming Macbook event.
- eli 10y ago
  I had an iRiver player I loved. But, anyway, did you already own a Mac with FireWire then? Were you willing to buy one just to be able to use an iPod with it?
  - coldtea 10y ago
    I first bought the 2nd gen iPod, and I didn't have a Mac, but I had a PC laptop with a program called Musicmatch Jukebox (IIRC) for syncing.
- pragmar 10y ago
  Archos Jukebox was pretty great--had SPDIF IO and an accessible 2.5" hard drive (upgradable). Wasn't pretty, but in terms of functionality, it was amazing for its time. Rockbox firmware was icing on the cake. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series
- xenadu02 10y ago
  > I had Nomad like devices and they were crap. Tell me about it. I also used Windows Mobile phones (and PocketPC before that). The iPhone was revolutionary compared to every other product on the market at the time. Even Android was just a Blackberry clone at the time. Yet I've seen people argue right here on HN that there was nothing special about the original iPhone. Apple is always beleaguered. Just like everything is 100% obvious in hindsight. DropBox/Box is just rsync. Instacart is just paying someone to shop for you. Uber is just a taxi service.

romanhn 10y ago

A similar thread here: http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.500/ http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.50.... I have to say, I felt pretty much the same way at the time...

dougmwne 10y ago
It's so easy to collectively re-write history. Archived gems like this make it a little harder. The iPod ended as a cultural phenomenon, but it definitely didn't start that way. You would have to have been truly prescient to have explained at the time why Apple was on the right track.