6 ms·

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

by 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.
detaro 10y ago
EDIT: world-wide market share (that I didn't find good numbers on in first search) also was (to) surprisingly high, so my impression was clearly wrong. Still interesting that such a specific device (and thus market segment: expensive mp3 players with hard disks) dominates so much. I honestly can only name 2 people I know that owned iPods of various kinds, in an era where nearly everybody around me had some kind mp3 playing device.
- xenadu02 10y ago
  Because iPods were 70%+ of the entire MP3 player market worldwide for years? That's certainly a valid definition of "won" in my book. Your personal anecdotes are not data.
FabHK 10y ago
My original iPod still worked when my last FireWire Mac gave up.
usrusr 10y ago
For a long time the iPod was the only device capable of making sense of the huge, chaotic mess of file people had after making "file sharing" a hobby. The competition had perfectly workable solutions for the amount of data you would get from buying CDs or doing the occasional "backup copy", but only Apple was providing tools for to comfortably deal with the massive increase in music availability. And the high price nicely fitted the inverse budget gap left when people stopped to buy music. Apple was pretty much saved by music piracy before using that position to become the biggest music distributor themselves, all while still not having properly bought the bootlegged trademark from Apple Corp.
SG- 10y ago
my original iPod still works to this day, of course I haven't used it in ages.

by tw04 10y ago

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.

detaro 10y ago

EDIT: world-wide market share (that I didn't find good numbers on in first search) also was (to) surprisingly high, so my impression was clearly wrong. Still interesting that such a specific device (and thus market segment: expensive mp3 players with hard disks) dominates so much. I honestly can only name 2 people I know that owned iPods of various kinds, in an era where nearly everybody around me had some kind mp3 playing device.

xenadu02 10y ago
Because iPods were 70%+ of the entire MP3 player market worldwide for years? That's certainly a valid definition of "won" in my book. Your personal anecdotes are not data.

FabHK 10y ago

My original iPod still worked when my last FireWire Mac gave up.

usrusr 10y ago

For a long time the iPod was the only device capable of making sense of the huge, chaotic mess of file people had after making "file sharing" a hobby. The competition had perfectly workable solutions for the amount of data you would get from buying CDs or doing the occasional "backup copy", but only Apple was providing tools for to comfortably deal with the massive increase in music availability. And the high price nicely fitted the inverse budget gap left when people stopped to buy music. Apple was pretty much saved by music piracy before using that position to become the biggest music distributor themselves, all while still not having properly bought the bootlegged trademark from Apple Corp.

SG- 10y ago

my original iPod still works to this day, of course I haven't used it in ages.