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It's interesting how much of these personal accounts directly contradict each other. I don't think much, if any, of the contradictions are in bad faith... just an interesting window into the collective human ability to tell stories to suit our perceptions after the fact.
[no time for video, so if these are answered let me know...] Two things I never got about the iPod: Why not add a second headphone jack so two people could listen and share the experience? Why didn't Apple preload some music (maybe classical stuff in the public domain, performed by affordable Eastern European orchestras) for a better out of the box experience? Think about kids getting an iPod at Christmas; until it w…
The iPod wasn't that type of device. It was an addition to iTunes. It did have a folder structure but the music files were 4 letter codes. As soon as iTunes associated a new iPod it wiped the hard drive and loaded it's own configurations and files. iTunes on the otherhand, early on, did come with a small music selection. This would be OS9 era bands and musicians who were just famous enough to be featured but not famo…
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> At no point in the ipod's history was it particularly innovative with its hardware in comparison to competing devices When the iPod came out I remember the main competitor was the Creative Nomad Jukebox. It was bulky (it was the around the same size as a Sony discman), the screen was small, and it had like 11 weirdly shaped buttons, and I think had recharable AA batteries (that took like 12 hours to charge). It was…
Having FireWire onboard allowing you to transfer songs in seconds instead of minutes was no less a gamechanger than anything else. The Nomad Jukebox was USB 1.1 and filling up a 6GB hard drive took hours.
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> famous article edited by CmdrTaco "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." (Nomads were pretty technically impressive at the time, but good luck fitting one in your pocket, or finding the track you want in a collection of thousands.)
darkpuma> cmdrtaco is wrongly maligned, the ipod would not become massively successful until further revisions were released. cmdrtaco> Thank you for setting the record straight! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19447152
I loved the back and forth when Jon Rubinstein was at Palm, when every other update for the Palm Pre would have the phone identify as an iPod in iTunes. https://www.wired.com/2009/10/palm-pre-itunes/
Its main advantage, though, is its ease of repair and upgradeability: an amateur with a plastic pry tool and a screwdriver can do nearly anything in a matter of minutes: replace the battery, replace the LCD (which are extremely cheap), upgrade or replace its storage, replace the headphone jack, etc.
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Slashdot has a famous article edited by CmdrTaco declaring the iPod to be lame for not comparing favourably in tech specs to other devices. Jobs has always been big on timing and marketing. He was watching multitouch since the 80s. Apple knew how to take developing tech and make it cool. Tech specs and innovation have always been 1/4 of the deal.
> famous article edited by CmdrTaco "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." (Nomads were pretty technically impressive at the time, but good luck fitting one in your pocket, or finding the track you want in a collection of thousands.)
I've been reading/watching a lot about Apple history lately. The two or three threads by Chris MacAskill on Cake that have been linked here recently, some audiobooks, podcasts and the documentary 'General Magic'. It's interesting how much of these personal accounts directly contradict each other. I don't think much, if any, of the contradictions are in bad faith... just an interesting window into the collective human…
[no time for video, so if these are answered let me know...] Two things I never got about the iPod: Why not add a second headphone jack so two people could listen and share the experience? Why didn't Apple preload some music (maybe classical stuff in the public domain, performed by affordable Eastern European orchestras) for a better out of the box experience? Think about kids getting an iPod at Christmas; until it w…
Two headphone jacks is precisely the sort of feature that a developer would find handy but might not make sense from a product view. For one, people will immediately wonder, which jack should I use? Are they different in some way? Or worse, if you put the jacks side by side, they might wonder if you need a specific jack style, like airplanes. It's also less pretty. More jacks is more ports is less sleek. I know, dumb…
If anything, it would have made more sense to have a branch jack in the iPod headphones.