Agree, and to dive in a bit more to the icing, one of the most important and least remembered ingredients in that icing was the 1.8" Toshiba hard drive. That al

Agree, and to dive in a bit more to the icing, one of the most important and least remembered ingredients in that icing was the 1.8" Toshiba hard drive. That allowed for the miniaturization of the iPod relative to other, clunkier players like the Nomad that used much larger 2.5" laptop hard drives [1], or flash-based players that could store only 25-50 songs. Combined with iTunes, they solved for the end-to-end experience: easy to use, easy to carry around, easy to manage your library. Other players only solved for the narrow experience of playing music. To be honest, though I do like the industrial design of the first iPod, it was perhaps the weakest part of the icing. The click wheel hadn't even been invented. It was all about the three pillars of iTunes, compact size, and '1000 songs in your pocket'. Despite the subject of the post being about copying, on iPod they actually copied very little from existing products of the time, in style and substance. [1] http://www.iretron.com/blog/posts/technology-flashback-creative-nomad-jukebox-2000/ http://www.iretron.com/blog/posts/technology-flashback-creat...