10 ms·

A lucky set of circumstances led to the iPod dominating the digital audio player market: bold marketing, a smaller HDD form factor, high-speed FireWire connecti

A lucky set of circumstances led to the iPod dominating the digital audio player market: bold marketing, a smaller HDD form factor, high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs. The Windows world at the time was a big mess of nonstandard cabling, messy drivers, sketchy quasi-shareware applications vying for presence on your desktop, while the Apple world was plug-and-play over a high-speed bus that came standard, and the music management experience was top-notch. And while there was some good hardware coming out of Korea to give the iPod a run for its money, the integrated Apple experience was without match. For Windows, Apple bundled MusicMatch Jukebox at first, but then made iTunes available on Windows, which became their foothold that would later set up the iPhone for success. By the time Microsoft caught up with WinXP and Windows Media Player, Apple had already stolen the higher end of the market, leaving WMP largely in the domain of cheap flash-based USB sticks that could only fit a subset of your songs. Then everyone pivoted to a DRM-laden storefront, making switching costs high. A later effort to refocus their first-party efforts with Zune resulted in an incompatible DRM ecosystem, and fizzled on the market. The iPod, in many ways, foreshadowed the Apple tactic that would become famous from the later iPhone: take the state-of-the-art in a particular market, pare it down a bit, endow it with tasteful industrial design, make sure it has a strong, ideally "frustration-free" integrated environment to take part in, give it an upmarket but justifiable price, and market the heck out of it with aspirational brand advertising.

Eridrus 9y ago
I feel like this is a rewriting of history. I knew literally a single person with a mac when the iPod came out, and they were not the first person I knew with an iPod. My recollection of the time was that most MP3 players were based on Flash storage rather than HDDs, so I could get about 10 songs onto mine. Macs didn't really take off as a thing until long after iPods had been mainstream for a while, so I don't think the integration was actually very important compared to the fact that there was a well known HDD-based MP3 player.
- koyote 9y ago
  There were certainly HDD-Mp3 players around before the iPod (I used to own a Creative Nomad Jukebox and then the excellent Archos Jukebox which even allowed you to flash open source firmware on it). I think the first Windows compatible iPod was the game changer. It had a large HDD but was much lighter and smaller than similar HDD-mp3 players at the time (such as the ones above).
  - astrodust 9y ago
    Apple might streamline their offerings, simplify them dramatically, but they also aggressively update it. Where the Nomad came out and was incrementally improved the iPod got re-invented several times, often cannibalizing its own market share in the process. Part fashion accessory, part music appliance, part computer, the purpose of the iPod was understood by Apple and poorly understood by their competitors. Just like how the Walkman wasn't the first portable cassette player, or even technically the best, Sony relentlessly innovated on that form factor making smaller, lighter versions, waterproof ones, and ultimately owned that market. It wasn't until the iPod rolled around that someone displaced that position so completely.
  - mgr86 9y ago
    you are correct. I was on my second HDD-Based mp3 player before the Ipod came around. I Also had the Nomad and replaced it with the Zen. Googling I see dozens of models, but I believe it was the Zen Xtra. I still have it in a box of old electronics. I recall it being very difficult to explain to my peers what I was carrying. Thankfully the nomad looked like a CD player.
- adamlett 9y ago
  The fact that you knew only one person with a Mac when the iPod came out really makes you rather unsuited to speak about what went on with the iPod in the greater Mac community at a time when the iPod was exclusive to Macs. You are falling prey to the availability heuristic[1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    Certainly, my point was that the Mac community was not particularly relevant to the success of the iPod, due to its small size, and the growth of the iPod far outpaced the growth of Mac computers.
    - qubex 9y ago
      Enabling that supra-Mac growth of iPod sales was precisely the reason why starting with the iPod 3G Apple shifted from FireWire to USB and began supporting filesystems beyond HFS+. (Off topic, but not that much: my sister grabbed her first iPod as a windows user approximately 12 hours after the 3G became available on the shelves here in Italy, mainly because she had been so envious of mine... so anecdotally there was quite a lot of pent-up demand, and they were smart to bottle it up to the point of explosion and then harness it.)
      - Eridrus 9y ago
        Clearly there was pent up demand, my main argument is that "integration" wasn't the reason for the demand, as evidenced by the huge spike of iPod sales, rather than iPod + Mac sales. I mean, I had a iPod, but I used 3rd party software to load it since iTunes was mess.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - qubex 9y ago
    That’s a very harsh statement. I was the only person I knew with a Mac when I started using them in 2002 (coming from OpenStep on an x86 machine, so hardly the prototypical ‘switcher’). It's probably fairly typical that in the very late 1990s or very early 2000s some high proportion of switchers (particularly those working outside of certain lines of work such as DTP or video editing) found themselves in contexts where they themselves were the only person on the platform, these people are literally those that jump-started the gradual shift towards the Mac as a revived platform.
- Joeri 9y ago
  Your recollection matches mine. I got my first 2nd gen ipod when I was using windows and when it still came bundled with musicmatch (which was worse than any version of itunes). Ecosystem was not a consideration, storage space and ease of use were. The huge screen, clean UI and clickwheel were a major improvement over contemporary mp3 players. That ipod still works. Every once in a while I charge it and listen to the gentle clicking of its tiny drive.
- FabHK 9y ago
  I got the iPod the day it came out in the UK (2001-11-22, London MacExpo, Islington), plugged it into my Mac, and in short order had all my iTunes music on it, including playlists (remember: iTunes was there before the iPod; Apple even had a "Rip, Mix, Burn" commercial [1]). Sure, at that time, few people had a Mac, but certain demographics had it. And I distinctly recall that people in the office were curious about the iPod, and were impressed with the intuitive UI (with the physical scroll wheel, which was really quite nice - it had inertia and would spin a while when you spun fast). FireWire, integration, and storage size ("all your music in your pocket") definitely played a role. Basically, if you had an iTunes library, the iPod was a total no-brainer. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECN4ZE9-Mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECN4ZE9-Mo
- j45 9y ago
  iTunes on Windows was generally better than most things on Windows. Musicmatch was pretty decent though.
Someone1234 9y ago
> By the time Microsoft caught up with WinXP and Windows Media Player Windows XP pre-dates the iPod. Windows Media Player pre-dates the iPod by over ten years. The whole post feels like you've re-imagined a lot of the history, certainly much of it doesn't align with my experiences and impressions at the time.
- astura 9y ago
  It most certainly is a reimagining of history, everyone was using Winamp to play their mp3s when the iPod first came out in 2001. Winamp was the best, nothing came close to beating it. AOL paid $80 million for Winamp. Meanwhile Apple had the monstrosity that was/is QuickTime. The reason iPod was so popular was it's form factor/UI/UX/ease of use and the iTunes Music Store. It also needed USB to become successful, FireWire held the iPod back from mainstream adoption.
  - niftich 9y ago
    Winamp 2 was the music player of choice of discretionary users who knew to seek out software on their own. Winamp 3 came out and it was so colossally awful that most people stayed on 2. If you bought your computer in a store -- like most people in the US at the time -- instead of building your own, it came bundled with some other product: WMP at least, possibly MusicMatch, RealJukebox (eventually merged back into RealPlayer), which you were likely using. Getting your Nomad or iRiver, a comparable devices to the iPod, to work with that, was not as smooth as the iTunes-iPod combo.
    - seba_dos1 9y ago
      Getting your device to work was just a matter of plugging them in and copying the files to the mass storage drive that appeared afterwards. From the most popular options, it was only the iPod that needed some special handling with special software to write to its proprietary database in order to listen to new files on your device.
  - FabHK 9y ago
    > Meanwhile Apple had the monstrosity that was/is QuickTime. Nope, Apple had had iTunes since 2001, and by the time the iPod came out, I for one had ripped most of my CDs to iTunes and basically used the Mac as the primary music machine.
jccc 9y ago
> A lucky set of circumstances led to the iPod dominating the digital audio player market: bold marketing, a smaller HDD form factor, high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs. Which of these four things are lucky circumstances and not the product of smart, consumer-thoughtful, hard work on the part of various teams at Apple? Why is it that Apple has been "lucky" in this way so many times when so many other companies could have won instead? > Apple had already stolen the higher end of the market Stolen? I realize this is just a turn of phrase, but I think it does reveal a strong bias that sees a market win by Apple as illegitimate.
- pilsetnieks 9y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with you but the small 1.8" HDD was kind of a stroke of luck. Rubinstein stumbled upon it visiting Toshiba, who didn't even know what they could use it for, but without it, there wouldn't be an iPod as we know it.
- ant512 9y ago
  Before I bought my first iPod I got a Sony Network Walkman NW-E3. It was about the size of a packet of gum, had 64MB of flash memory, and was so unrelentingly awful that I swore I would never buy another piece of Sony hardware. I don't remember ever feeling so furious about any other purchase I've made. That the iPod dominated the industry really shouldn't be a surprise when Sony was producing junk like the NW-E3.
dmitriid 9y ago
> A lucky set of circumstances led to the iPod dominating the digital audio player market: bold marketing, a smaller HDD form factor, high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs... Apple bundled MusicMatch Jukebox at first, but then made iTunes available on Windows That's a heck of a lot of "lucky circumstances" to call it "lucky circumstances" ;) I'd say it was a lot of hard work delivering on a (rather novel at the time) idea that may or may not have worked. All that effort paid off in the end. Same goes for iPhone.
icebraining 9y ago
FireWire was irrelevant; the iPod sales only picked up when it got full USB support in 2004: https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/images/192/19221.png https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/images/192/...
untog 9y ago
> high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs. These two, at least, aren't it. The iPod only became truly successful once it had a USB connection and a Windows client. Before that point it was a total niche product.
Fnoord 9y ago
> A lucky set of circumstances led to the iPod dominating the digital audio player market: bold marketing, a smaller HDD form factor, high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs. The best thing about the iPod was its usability (the scrolling wheel). Mac integration is pretty irrelevant since almost everyone had a PC back in those days. I had an iRiver H340 [1] back in those days (~2004 or so). It had decent hardware keys for control, and a whopping 40 GB of space (with a 2.5" HDD). iPods back then had a fraction of that. The iRiver h3x0 could play both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. The battery would last long enough for commuting back & forth. But it didn't have such a scrolling wheel. Nor did it have any of the DRM garbage. Nor did it receive any of the marketing or hype the iPod had. You could however just download a bunch of MP3 from a.b.mp3.* or whatever and fill your device up. Back in those days, it was even legal to "download" in my country. Or you could use EAC to rip a bunch of your CDs and have it with you on the go in a more portable... "format". Oh, and it had USB OTG. You could also pimp it with unofficial open source firmware, Rockbox [2] Quoting Cnet's review from 2005: "It's just not as out-of-the-box simple as the iPod. If this all sounds discouraging, just remember: the H340 does so much more than the iPod." and "It's noticeably thick, not to mention heavier than it looks. (In the world of gadgets, a few ounces or fractions of inches make a difference.) The overall look is utilitarian although the color screen does add some style points. We like to call the H340 the "Soviet iPod."" [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iriver_H300_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iriver_H300_series [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox [3] https://www.cnet.com/products/iriver-h320-20gb/review/ https://www.cnet.com/products/iriver-h320-20gb/review/
scarface74 9y ago
A lucky set of circumstances led to the iPod dominating the digital audio player market: bold marketing, a smaller HDD form factor, high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs. How is great execution "luck"?
frik 9y ago
And iPad Mini?? It seems dead as well. No new iPad Mini since 2015, with an outdated hardware equivalent to a iPhone 6 (2014). iOS11 artificially slows down iPad Mini 4 and no new iPad Mini in sight. I bought the iPad Mini 4 at Apple HQ shop, they gazed at me when I asked for an iPad Mini earlier this year. They only sell a 128GB model, no other model. Next time I will avoid impulsive shopping of Apple products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_Mini_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_Mini_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A8 ... iPhone 6 and Ipad Mini 4 have the same CPU
mikestew 9y ago
By the time Microsoft caught up with WinXP and Windows Media Player "Caught up"? The steaming pile that Microsoft call Windows Media Player is the sole reason I ever bought an iPod. Synching was barely worthy of the word, getting music on any of the "Plays for Sure" devices was a pain in the ass, random shit just didn't work (I recall making a playlist was damned near impossible), and to put the cherry on top, all of your Plays for Sure surely didn't play after they shut that store down. Please note for the record that I was a Kool-Aid guzzling Microsoft employee at the time. Any sane person would have given up on the first try. So one day the wife and I headed to the local Apple Store and hooked ourselves up with a couple of Nanos. The lack of friction made long-term customers out of us.
niroze 9y ago
Pretty much all of this is fiction.
lobf 9y ago
It was all about the interface for me- and the fact that I could turn the volume up / down, and play / pause through the outside of my pants pocket. That was THE killer feature.
Const-me 9y ago
Microsoft and macs were completely irrelevant. The main competitor for Apple’s iPods was Sony. And the reason why Apple won is the fact that Sony also includes Sony Music, i.e. insisted on DRM. I think that’s why minidiscs didn’t really took off.

Eridrus 9y ago

I feel like this is a rewriting of history. I knew literally a single person with a mac when the iPod came out, and they were not the first person I knew with an iPod. My recollection of the time was that most MP3 players were based on Flash storage rather than HDDs, so I could get about 10 songs onto mine. Macs didn't really take off as a thing until long after iPods had been mainstream for a while, so I don't think the integration was actually very important compared to the fact that there was a well known HDD-based MP3 player.

koyote 9y ago
There were certainly HDD-Mp3 players around before the iPod (I used to own a Creative Nomad Jukebox and then the excellent Archos Jukebox which even allowed you to flash open source firmware on it). I think the first Windows compatible iPod was the game changer. It had a large HDD but was much lighter and smaller than similar HDD-mp3 players at the time (such as the ones above).
- astrodust 9y ago
  Apple might streamline their offerings, simplify them dramatically, but they also aggressively update it. Where the Nomad came out and was incrementally improved the iPod got re-invented several times, often cannibalizing its own market share in the process. Part fashion accessory, part music appliance, part computer, the purpose of the iPod was understood by Apple and poorly understood by their competitors. Just like how the Walkman wasn't the first portable cassette player, or even technically the best, Sony relentlessly innovated on that form factor making smaller, lighter versions, waterproof ones, and ultimately owned that market. It wasn't until the iPod rolled around that someone displaced that position so completely.
- mgr86 9y ago
  you are correct. I was on my second HDD-Based mp3 player before the Ipod came around. I Also had the Nomad and replaced it with the Zen. Googling I see dozens of models, but I believe it was the Zen Xtra. I still have it in a box of old electronics. I recall it being very difficult to explain to my peers what I was carrying. Thankfully the nomad looked like a CD player.
adamlett 9y ago
The fact that you knew only one person with a Mac when the iPod came out really makes you rather unsuited to speak about what went on with the iPod in the greater Mac community at a time when the iPod was exclusive to Macs. You are falling prey to the availability heuristic[1]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
- Eridrus 9y ago
  Certainly, my point was that the Mac community was not particularly relevant to the success of the iPod, due to its small size, and the growth of the iPod far outpaced the growth of Mac computers.
  - qubex 9y ago
    Enabling that supra-Mac growth of iPod sales was precisely the reason why starting with the iPod 3G Apple shifted from FireWire to USB and began supporting filesystems beyond HFS+. (Off topic, but not that much: my sister grabbed her first iPod as a windows user approximately 12 hours after the 3G became available on the shelves here in Italy, mainly because she had been so envious of mine... so anecdotally there was quite a lot of pent-up demand, and they were smart to bottle it up to the point of explosion and then harness it.)
    - Eridrus 9y ago
      Clearly there was pent up demand, my main argument is that "integration" wasn't the reason for the demand, as evidenced by the huge spike of iPod sales, rather than iPod + Mac sales. I mean, I had a iPod, but I used 3rd party software to load it since iTunes was mess.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
- qubex 9y ago
  That’s a very harsh statement. I was the only person I knew with a Mac when I started using them in 2002 (coming from OpenStep on an x86 machine, so hardly the prototypical ‘switcher’). It's probably fairly typical that in the very late 1990s or very early 2000s some high proportion of switchers (particularly those working outside of certain lines of work such as DTP or video editing) found themselves in contexts where they themselves were the only person on the platform, these people are literally those that jump-started the gradual shift towards the Mac as a revived platform.
Joeri 9y ago
Your recollection matches mine. I got my first 2nd gen ipod when I was using windows and when it still came bundled with musicmatch (which was worse than any version of itunes). Ecosystem was not a consideration, storage space and ease of use were. The huge screen, clean UI and clickwheel were a major improvement over contemporary mp3 players. That ipod still works. Every once in a while I charge it and listen to the gentle clicking of its tiny drive.
FabHK 9y ago
I got the iPod the day it came out in the UK (2001-11-22, London MacExpo, Islington), plugged it into my Mac, and in short order had all my iTunes music on it, including playlists (remember: iTunes was there before the iPod; Apple even had a "Rip, Mix, Burn" commercial [1]). Sure, at that time, few people had a Mac, but certain demographics had it. And I distinctly recall that people in the office were curious about the iPod, and were impressed with the intuitive UI (with the physical scroll wheel, which was really quite nice - it had inertia and would spin a while when you spun fast). FireWire, integration, and storage size ("all your music in your pocket") definitely played a role. Basically, if you had an iTunes library, the iPod was a total no-brainer. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECN4ZE9-Mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECN4ZE9-Mo
j45 9y ago
iTunes on Windows was generally better than most things on Windows. Musicmatch was pretty decent though.

Someone1234 9y ago

> By the time Microsoft caught up with WinXP and Windows Media Player Windows XP pre-dates the iPod. Windows Media Player pre-dates the iPod by over ten years. The whole post feels like you've re-imagined a lot of the history, certainly much of it doesn't align with my experiences and impressions at the time.

astura 9y ago
It most certainly is a reimagining of history, everyone was using Winamp to play their mp3s when the iPod first came out in 2001. Winamp was the best, nothing came close to beating it. AOL paid $80 million for Winamp. Meanwhile Apple had the monstrosity that was/is QuickTime. The reason iPod was so popular was it's form factor/UI/UX/ease of use and the iTunes Music Store. It also needed USB to become successful, FireWire held the iPod back from mainstream adoption.
- niftich 9y ago
  Winamp 2 was the music player of choice of discretionary users who knew to seek out software on their own. Winamp 3 came out and it was so colossally awful that most people stayed on 2. If you bought your computer in a store -- like most people in the US at the time -- instead of building your own, it came bundled with some other product: WMP at least, possibly MusicMatch, RealJukebox (eventually merged back into RealPlayer), which you were likely using. Getting your Nomad or iRiver, a comparable devices to the iPod, to work with that, was not as smooth as the iTunes-iPod combo.
  - seba_dos1 9y ago
    Getting your device to work was just a matter of plugging them in and copying the files to the mass storage drive that appeared afterwards. From the most popular options, it was only the iPod that needed some special handling with special software to write to its proprietary database in order to listen to new files on your device.
- FabHK 9y ago
  > Meanwhile Apple had the monstrosity that was/is QuickTime. Nope, Apple had had iTunes since 2001, and by the time the iPod came out, I for one had ripped most of my CDs to iTunes and basically used the Mac as the primary music machine.

jccc 9y ago

> A lucky set of circumstances led to the iPod dominating the digital audio player market: bold marketing, a smaller HDD form factor, high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs. Which of these four things are lucky circumstances and not the product of smart, consumer-thoughtful, hard work on the part of various teams at Apple? Why is it that Apple has been "lucky" in this way so many times when so many other companies could have won instead? > Apple had already stolen the higher end of the market Stolen? I realize this is just a turn of phrase, but I think it does reveal a strong bias that sees a market win by Apple as illegitimate.

pilsetnieks 9y ago
I'm not disagreeing with you but the small 1.8" HDD was kind of a stroke of luck. Rubinstein stumbled upon it visiting Toshiba, who didn't even know what they could use it for, but without it, there wouldn't be an iPod as we know it.
ant512 9y ago
Before I bought my first iPod I got a Sony Network Walkman NW-E3. It was about the size of a packet of gum, had 64MB of flash memory, and was so unrelentingly awful that I swore I would never buy another piece of Sony hardware. I don't remember ever feeling so furious about any other purchase I've made. That the iPod dominated the industry really shouldn't be a surprise when Sony was producing junk like the NW-E3.

dmitriid 9y ago

> A lucky set of circumstances led to the iPod dominating the digital audio player market: bold marketing, a smaller HDD form factor, high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs... Apple bundled MusicMatch Jukebox at first, but then made iTunes available on Windows That's a heck of a lot of "lucky circumstances" to call it "lucky circumstances" ;) I'd say it was a lot of hard work delivering on a (rather novel at the time) idea that may or may not have worked. All that effort paid off in the end. Same goes for iPhone.

icebraining 9y ago

FireWire was irrelevant; the iPod sales only picked up when it got full USB support in 2004: https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/images/192/19221.png https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/images/192/...

untog 9y ago

> high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs. These two, at least, aren't it. The iPod only became truly successful once it had a USB connection and a Windows client. Before that point it was a total niche product.

Fnoord 9y ago

> A lucky set of circumstances led to the iPod dominating the digital audio player market: bold marketing, a smaller HDD form factor, high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs. The best thing about the iPod was its usability (the scrolling wheel). Mac integration is pretty irrelevant since almost everyone had a PC back in those days. I had an iRiver H340 [1] back in those days (~2004 or so). It had decent hardware keys for control, and a whopping 40 GB of space (with a 2.5" HDD). iPods back then had a fraction of that. The iRiver h3x0 could play both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. The battery would last long enough for commuting back & forth. But it didn't have such a scrolling wheel. Nor did it have any of the DRM garbage. Nor did it receive any of the marketing or hype the iPod had. You could however just download a bunch of MP3 from a.b.mp3.* or whatever and fill your device up. Back in those days, it was even legal to "download" in my country. Or you could use EAC to rip a bunch of your CDs and have it with you on the go in a more portable... "format". Oh, and it had USB OTG. You could also pimp it with unofficial open source firmware, Rockbox [2] Quoting Cnet's review from 2005: "It's just not as out-of-the-box simple as the iPod. If this all sounds discouraging, just remember: the H340 does so much more than the iPod." and "It's noticeably thick, not to mention heavier than it looks. (In the world of gadgets, a few ounces or fractions of inches make a difference.) The overall look is utilitarian although the color screen does add some style points. We like to call the H340 the "Soviet iPod."" [3] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iriver_H300_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iriver_H300_series [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox [3] https://www.cnet.com/products/iriver-h320-20gb/review/ https://www.cnet.com/products/iriver-h320-20gb/review/

scarface74 9y ago

frik 9y ago

And iPad Mini?? It seems dead as well. No new iPad Mini since 2015, with an outdated hardware equivalent to a iPhone 6 (2014). iOS11 artificially slows down iPad Mini 4 and no new iPad Mini in sight. I bought the iPad Mini 4 at Apple HQ shop, they gazed at me when I asked for an iPad Mini earlier this year. They only sell a 128GB model, no other model. Next time I will avoid impulsive shopping of Apple products. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_Mini_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_Mini_4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A8 ... iPhone 6 and Ipad Mini 4 have the same CPU

mikestew 9y ago

By the time Microsoft caught up with WinXP and Windows Media Player "Caught up"? The steaming pile that Microsoft call Windows Media Player is the sole reason I ever bought an iPod. Synching was barely worthy of the word, getting music on any of the "Plays for Sure" devices was a pain in the ass, random shit just didn't work (I recall making a playlist was damned near impossible), and to put the cherry on top, all of your Plays for Sure surely didn't play after they shut that store down. Please note for the record that I was a Kool-Aid guzzling Microsoft employee at the time. Any sane person would have given up on the first try. So one day the wife and I headed to the local Apple Store and hooked ourselves up with a couple of Nanos. The lack of friction made long-term customers out of us.

niroze 9y ago

Pretty much all of this is fiction.

lobf 9y ago

It was all about the interface for me- and the fact that I could turn the volume up / down, and play / pause through the outside of my pants pocket. That was THE killer feature.

Const-me 9y ago

Microsoft and macs were completely irrelevant. The main competitor for Apple’s iPods was Sony. And the reason why Apple won is the fact that Sony also includes Sony Music, i.e. insisted on DRM. I think that’s why minidiscs didn’t really took off.