251–260 of 467 posts
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>no faster In terms of latency it's usually slower by an order of magnitude. There should be a law that mandates developers to use at least two generations older hardware than the average consumer.
I want my ps2 keyboard port back
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I had added this paragraph before you posted but probably after you saw my comment: >> Maybe Apple would have slightly higher storage capacities, but... we're talking about a relatively marginal difference compared to the gulf in storage capacity between these microdrive MP3 players and the flash based MP3 players of the time. An advantage, but not a revolution. Regardless, it turns out that it wasn't even a capacity…
Ah, you must not have seen the pre-ipod players. The Personal Jukebox was 2.5 larger than an ipod. It didn't fit in a pocket and the grey plastic felt cheap compared to the ipod's shiny metal back. It really felt experimental, and nothing like the polished Walkmen Sony was making.
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Interesting article, thanks for that. One of my key takeaways is the iPod represented not one but multiple simultaneous tech revolutions. Consumer storage until then unseen, paired with material and interface design that companies hadn't considered a priority.
I forget the exact timeline, but I think part of it too was music pricing. Physical media (tapes, records) had gotten very expensive, and almost everyone was pirating MP3s from Napster etc. Apple's iTunes prices were low enough that it became simpler just to buy stuff legally than pirate it. I can't recall if iTunes was introduced at exact same time as iPod not not. Google search suggests it may have been 1 or 2 year…
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I wouldn’t read it that way. Jobs was good at noticing something would become possible 2-3 years before the rest of the industry. Flash-based players existed back then, and would have followed the trajectory the iPod jumped on a few years after it launched. The iPod interface was middling. (iTunes really, really sucked, but the device was nice) Enabling podcasts was a big deal though. I’ll give them that.
iTunes was amazing. It’s UI was so successful it guided most of the Mac’s for next decade: Coverflow and Spotlight are direct descendants. Every major OS has Spotlight-like UI these days. You can thank iTunes for the search-as-filter paradigm. It also did everything you’d need regarding MP3s. You could rip CDs, organize and burn them, have the lyrics and album artwork show neatly while displaying a cool set of animat…
I think your Apple bias is clouding your memory.
Apple certainly didn't invent the Spotlight UI. Quicksilver did it before on OS X, and my memory is hazy, but it also might've been inspired by another app.
iTunes also didn't invent the search-as-filter paradigm. I remember using something similar on foobar2000 in the early 2000s, and it might've been available even before in some Winamp plugins. Again, hazy memory, and it's difficult to track down these things now with any certainty.
I'm not arguing against your love for iTunes, but I think you're overstating its influence on software design.
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History suggests we will see obnoxious hacker news comments about how the M-series processors are some unrivaled alien technology that will be forever unbeaten when it comes to performance followed by AMD releasing a low wattage CPU with better multicore performance about 8 months later (or whenever they get fab capacity anyways).
Is there any Windows machine that's fanless and at M1 speeds?
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I forget the exact timeline, but I think part of it too was music pricing. Physical media (tapes, records) had gotten very expensive, and almost everyone was pirating MP3s from Napster etc. Apple's iTunes prices were low enough that it became simpler just to buy stuff legally than pirate it. I can't recall if iTunes was introduced at exact same time as iPod not not. Google search suggests it may have been 1 or 2 year…
Like you said, Napster et al. Apple pretended it came from CDs people had bought.
Napster was all but toast once iTunes was on the scene, but Kaza and Limewire weren't any better in the problem of getting say, a whole album (those were still a thing) perfectly cataloged with metadata - and in high quality. iTunes made that very easy.
With the iPod, I would then just borrow people's iPods instead of CDs.
I didn't get into - and actually still don't subscribe to, a music service like Spotify. A few years after starting above, I would still just buy CDs from touring bands (these were bands driving cross country in vans and playing condemned warehouses, so safe to say their stuff wasn't being traded as mp3's, and if they were, they would have LOVED it). I remember buying some music off of iTunes Music, but I tried to not, as sharing their the system I had didn't work well - or even across my own devices.
MySpace Music was also big in discovery. Their whole music catalog was lost, though, right? Someone lost the private key?
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This comparison is somewhat disingenuous. Why would they compare 3nm to 5mm, when the current TSMC process is 4nm, not 5nm? We don't know how (un)impressive the improvements of the 3nm process are, when we don't know how much of the difference between 5nm and 3nm merely comes from the difference between between 5nm and 4nm.
From what I have read, 4nm is not really a significant process change and is really just a variant of 5nm. There have been only minimal improvements in chips going form 5nm to 4nm as a result. 3nm really is different.
I'd like to see evidence for that, i.e. that the change from 4nm to 3nm offers significantly larger efficiency improvements than the change from 5nm to 4nm.
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For the first year or so, the experience of using these 3nm machines will be unparalleled. Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs. Paraphrasing the old saying: "What TSMC giveth, Electron taketh"
I wonder if there's a baseline for cynical comments about application performance? Because it sure seems like this exact comment is a tinnitus-like constant ringing noise amongst the tech community.
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I forget the exact timeline, but I think part of it too was music pricing. Physical media (tapes, records) had gotten very expensive, and almost everyone was pirating MP3s from Napster etc. Apple's iTunes prices were low enough that it became simpler just to buy stuff legally than pirate it. I can't recall if iTunes was introduced at exact same time as iPod not not. Google search suggests it may have been 1 or 2 year…
> but if so then where were people originally getting music to put on iPods The first iPod was a Mac-only Firewire device. "You need a Mac with Firewire support to even use this thing" set a minimum platform spec that also made other things implicit — in this case, the availability of a CD-ROM drive. (Which wasn't a given in 2001, but was a given on any Mac that had Firewire support.) iTunes the software was introduc…
It would have still been pretty odd to see a PC with no CD-ROM drive in 2001. It wasn't a given a machine would have a DVD-ROM drive in 2001, but CD-ROM was cheap by 2001 and rather ubiquitous.
Most home PCs in a box started shipping with CD-ROM in the mid 90s, along with Windows 95/98 etc, and by 2001 virtually all new software you bought at retail would require you to have one.
The firewire port was largely because IIRC USB 2 didnt exist at launch of iPod - transferring 5GB via USB 1 was painfully slow, the trick the iPod could do at the time that no competitor could was sync 1000 songs incredibly quickly.
> iTunes the software was introduced alongside the iPod
This isn't the case, iTunes was released before the iPod- before iPod "Rip/Mix/Burn" was a big marketing strategy for the iMac. The iPod did follow quickly though. Many of us had substantial libraries in iTunes before the iPod landed. Wikipedia suggests it was iTunes 2.0 that brought iPod support.