Now that's just silly. You clearly didn't use both the 1st generation iPod and its competitors. I fiddled around with the Creative Jukebox or whatever it was

Now that's just silly. You clearly didn't use both the 1st generation iPod and its competitors. I fiddled around with the Creative Jukebox or whatever it was called before buying the first iPod: the forward next buttons barely worked, the LCD could barely fit the name of a single track on the screen, and the entire UI was barely responsive. The click wheel for scrolling, the large LCD, the great battery life, the incredible form factor... the iPod was 5 years ahead of the competitors. There were the Rios which were well made, but that was a different league... they were more akin to the shuffle. And to top it all off, I was using Windows at the time, so it was at a software disadvantage. I had to use some hacky 3rd party, unsupported software to even sync the thing.