The iPod really wasn't a technically complex product though - no more so then anything else at the time. The original iPod was "just" a hard drive with an LCD o

The iPod really wasn't a technically complex product though - no more so then anything else at the time. The original iPod was "just" a hard drive with an LCD on it. The big innovation was the wheel interface, and the quality of the plastic packaging/housing. Apple's big value proposition was realizing they could put premium-looking styling on a product and that would then justify the price point to add capability - at the time the whole point of the iPod was "it's got enormous storage". It literally was just a laptop HDD in a housing though. Which is to say: Apple's timeline for that is a pretty standard consumer product timeline. If they'd taken much longer then that you'd have to wonder what they were wasting their time on. EDIT: Like it's worth considering that Apple probably owes a lot of it's success to the specific finish and chemical formulation of the plastic they use, more then any specific technical merits of a lot of their products - building a plastic gadget that felt as good as an iPod did was a heck of an achievement, just not in the area people think.