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I'll never forget when Apple introduced iTunes (before the iPod) with the tagline "Rip, Mix and Burn". Classic Steve Jobs direct assault at an industry his com
by nemo44x 11y ago
I'll never forget when Apple introduced iTunes (before the iPod) with the tagline "Rip, Mix and Burn". Classic Steve Jobs direct assault at an industry his company was about to take over. Looking back, seeing how the iPod was under development at this time puts the entire strategy together.
Apple wasn't the first company to let you rip music, share it and burn CD's, etc but they were the one's who made it accessible to everyone with a seamless, fully integrated user experience. Users ripped all of their and their friends music, got used to the MP3 format and then the ease of buying MP3's from Apples store with iPod integration.
- soperj 11y agoEveryone? it took almost 3 years for them to release a windows version. Hell it didn't even run on OSX for nearly a year.
- stephengillie 11y agoHarvard Business case studies cite the delayed Windows version as a marketing tactic. "Everyone loved" the iPod, and apparently quite a few people bought a prerequisite Mac in order to use the iPod.
- frikk 11y agoI remember having to buy a firewire PCI port just to use my first iPod with Windows. It only worked sometimes, and I had to use some third party tool to upload music to it (or winamp, I think, had some limited support).
- nemo44x 11y agoIndeed. I looked weird on my college campus with a Mac. However, after the iPod the idea of using a Mac became more acceptable I saw a lot more of them. Now they are ubiquitous - something I would not have imagined 15 years ago.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoPorting iTunes to Windows might have been quite the effort, though. IIRC it's not a true native app, and runs on some port of Apple's libraries to Windows.
- frik 11y agoThe early iTunes version (iPod 2 era) was a dotNet 1 app and quiet slow. Only later Windows versions use ported MacOSX libraries on Windows. Safari5 (Windows version) used the same ported OSX libraries.
- LeoPanthera 11y agoiTunes never sold MP3s. It was originally encrypted AAC, then later plain AAC. The "FairPlay" DRM system (classic marketing name to make it sound good) always supported codecs other than AAC, leading to much speculation at the time that Apple would sell lossless tracks for a higher price, but it never happened.
- lucaspiller 11y agoI can't remember what I used to rip music, but I remember having a healthy collection of Winamp playlists with all my CDs in MP3 format way before Apple came on the scene. I had dial-up until late 2006 so I never really got into downloading music (20 minutes for a track wasn't worth it).
- nemo44x 11y agoDefinitely. Some of my friends had an apartment together in college and they had a tower connected to their TV and stereo with 1000's of songs on it. This was 1999 and was a pretty impressive idea I soon aped. Needless to say, small parties, LAN parties and get-togethers at my college apartment (really a huge place with 5 bedrooms, 2 living rooms) were awesome for the time.
- douche 11y agoOh, boy, those days in the early 2000s when iTunes was a usable piece of software. I was able to resurrect a couple of badly scratched Hendrix CDs with it. Can't remember the last time I allowed iTunes on one of my machines. Somewhere I think I have an iPod kicking around in one of the culch drawers in my desk... With Pandora, I haven't even thought about buying a CD in half a decade. Well, except for the copy of Master of Puppets that I found for a dollar at Marden's.