> By personal media players, I'm talking about MP3 players and iPod-like devices. Essentially post-CD players. They existed, they weren't popular. They weren't

> By personal media players, I'm talking about MP3 players and iPod-like devices. Essentially post-CD players. They existed, they weren't popular. They weren't popular because they just simply sucked. Flash memory was still expensive, so they'd usually only have enough room for 10 songs at the most. They didn't have displays to see file names, which I suppose isn't a big deal when you only have 10 songs. > Even the initial iPod took a while to gain a real market presence. I don't even consider the iPod to be innovative in any way besides maybe the click wheel. It was just that the iPod was the first product that was actually designed to be a good product and not a cheap money grab designed to get a few dollars from all the Napster users. To put it more bluntly, IMO, all the other products were made by boneheads. The iPod was the bare minimum of what an MP3 player should have been. It wasn't innovative, it just wasn't made by boneheads. Personally, I had always expected MP3 CD players to become a thing. I didn't like the iPod's idea of a hard drive (Though they weren't the first to make a portable MP3 player that used a hard drive). I expected them to have high failure rates from head crashes.