Those prices were still from over a year before Apple announced the iPod, in a market where technology was rapidly advancing and getting cheaper, and those were

Those prices were still from over a year before Apple announced the iPod, in a market where technology was rapidly advancing and getting cheaper, and those were the MSRP for single unit quantities, not the bulk order prices that would have been available at launch, let alone the bulk order prices that would have been available when Apple was planning to launch their iPod. As others have pointed out here, there were other competitors offering larger-than-1-inch hard drives like the ones Apple used. As I have pointed out elsewhere, a portable MP3 player with about 5GB of storage was actually introduced about 2 years before the iPod. Based on the available evidence, storage was not the defining feature that made iPod successful, which is the claim that anecdote was trying to make. The iPod was successful for other reasons, regardless of how emotionally compelling that anecdote tries to be.