The article has everything wrong about the "1000s of songs" example. Consumers in the day understood "1000 songs" as a unit of storage perfectly well. The first

The article has everything wrong about the "1000s of songs" example. Consumers in the day understood "1000 songs" as a unit of storage perfectly well. The first iPod was not competing against devices of 1GB, it was trampling units struggling to store even dozens of songs. The flash players back then were tiny and the iPod being bigger was all about specs. Orders of magnitude of specs. It was the heyday of p2p filesharing music piracy (as in people were not just doing it, they were ecstatic about it), with a whole generation of non-techy people suddenly turning into part time nerds just for all the abundant music. While all the other devices were engineered for the few songs one might own, the iPod was specces for the flood of music coming from filesharing (iTMS came much later).