Totally agree, in the main. Looking back it's very weird and un-Apple-like that iPod launched without iTMS, although taking their time held them in good stead w

Totally agree, in the main. Looking back it's very weird and un-Apple-like that iPod launched without iTMS, although taking their time held them in good stead with the App Store and simultaneously launching new hardware alongside a marketplace seems to have held them back with iPad/iBooks and the watch + its anaemic store. I quibble one point you made (sorry -- former employees sometimes turn into nitpicking apologists): > cmdrtaco was right about the extant iPod he was actually criticizing. It was lame and that iPod never became popular. You're right that this iPod never became as popular as we understand the iPod to have been looking back from 2020, but the implication is that it was held back because of the assessment cmdrtaco made of it: > No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. Clearly it had no WiFi and a lower capacity than a Nomad, but that would continue to be the case for many years, right up to peak iPod in 2008 when Apple introduced the first iPod with WiFi (iPod Touch 1G). (Apple was never interested in competing on capacity -- a feature -- and actively sought to reframe marketing towards _benefits_, like how many songs or photos the capacity enabled you to hold in your pocket.) So the absence of WiFi and lower capacity than Creative's lineup did not appear to be limiting factors in the iPod's success. I think they made it lame to cmdrtaco, but each subsequent iPod for the better part of a decade 'suffered' from the same lameness, and did so well that Amazon had precisely two sections for MP3 players for many years: "iPod" and "Non-iPod Music players"! I believe that the tipping point for iPod came alongside several things: the final refinement to the interaction model (scroll wheel => touch wheel -- the first device is identifiably an iPod but almost ashamedly so, with buttons around the edge of the wheel which ruin the fascia), the miniaturisation of the device (and in particular the ruthless Jobsian cannibalisation of the Mini with the Nano), and the vacuum of competition around iTMS from its launch through 2006 or so.