I hope Apple will make a 25th anniversary edition of the iPod, with modern connectors and internals but a physically clicky wheel like the original.
A Prototype Original iPod
101–110 of 140 posts
Re: A Prototype Original iPod
#102> We don’t know much about where it came from.
That’s the most important part! How did Panic got it? Why did they had to wait 20 years? Some trade secret deal expired?
Re: A Prototype Original iPod
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes.
Your comment (especially the colloquial use of the word "literally" as emphasis) implies that I didn't address the existence of that photo, but I did when I said "scroll down to see photos that actually demonstrate its size". Your comment and subsequent lack of clarification ("Yes.") is confusing and has the appearance of rudeness, but I can't guess why you would want to use that tone (if it's on purpose).
When something is shown literally as a picture of an object that is in contrast to a figurative drawing of a concept.
Re: A Prototype Original iPod
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
During the heydays of the iPod craze, around 2005-2008, I was convinced that product line would be short lived. It was apparent that music playing was a trivial application of mobile phones, which were already becoming ubiquitous. In those days, Nokia was a far bigger cultural phenomenon outside of North America (where Nokia never gained much of a foothold). And it was truly global, not just European: even tiny villa…
Anyone with a moderately sized music collection depended entirely on iTunes to manage their library, and were hence locked in to the iPod/iTunes eco-system. There was no reasonable alternative. Manually copying mp3 files to a Nokia or Blackberry just didn't come close to cutting it, and any attempts by those companies to compete with iTunes on the desktop ended in miserable failure due to piss-poor software quality.
> Anyone with a moderately sized music collection depended entirely on iTunes to manage their library, and were hence locked in to the iPod/iTunes eco-system. There was no reasonable alternative.
Sorry, not true. I had a large music collection, and did not bother with iPod in the early days (and when I tried much later, didn't like scrolling wheel). It did not work with OGG Vorbis, nor could it have any moderate amount of storage. My DAP had 40 GB: iRiver H340. This was around 2003/2004.
Re: A Prototype Original iPod
#105Hard to believe it has been 20 years. When talking about the impact of the original iPod on the last two decades of Apple's extraordinary success, I like to jump back to this forum thread from October 23rd 2001 (it is always easy to find because it is thread number 500!) and see the reactions from the time: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...
My favorite remains Slashdot's Editor-in-Chief CmdrTaco's "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." (shared with <3, it really shows how us geeks had/have no sense of the popularity of a tech product)
Terrible amount of storage indeed, so I did not bother with it. I went with a 40 GB iRiver H340 instead. By the time the battery was dying (2009?) I went with an iPod Touch and an iPod Classic with ~200 GB storage. I could not get used to the wheel for scrolling. Why not? Simply because I cannot aim with it, and it does (perhaps therefore?) not feel intuitive either. iPod Touch however was my first capacitive touch UI and I was sold (though again it had not much storage, hence I bought the Classic). I very much liked how Nokia was investing in Maemo (mobile touch UI Linux, largely but not completely FOSS), had various of their devices, but I knew at that point resistive touch UI would end up as a niche. They figured that out, too, with Qt and N9 but burning platform memo killed it.
Re: A Prototype Original iPod
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
The one thing I had always wanted my ipod to do was stream, so I def agree with the lack of wireless being lame. Just because the greater majority of users felt it was okay and made it the most popular music device doesn't mean it wasn't lame to not have it.
Wifi's still pretty bad, but it was really bad then. Especially on consumer wifi routers, but most business set-ups sucked then, too. Dropped packets galore, signal-loss hiccups, and not enough bandwidth to make up for that by transferring large buffers really fast. Terrible for streaming. Probably way more battery-draining then than now, as well, since that kind of hardware has generally gotten a lot more efficient.…
I don't think 802.11b was that bad. 128kbps mp3 streaming was considered "high quality" back then, so average quality streams were within realms of bare UMTS 3G(384k down) as well as some wireless Ethernet standards at that time, 11b included.
Re: A Prototype Original iPod
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cingular was renamed to AT&T in 2006.
Exactly -- during the iPhone unveiling all the demo screenshots showed "Cingular", but by the time it had been released, Cingular had been rebranded to AT&T.
I had (and still have) a launch day iPhone and it had "Cingular" on the carrier icon at the top of the screen.
Maybe the rollout timing was different in different markets.
Re: A Prototype Original iPod
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wifi's still pretty bad, but it was really bad then. Especially on consumer wifi routers, but most business set-ups sucked then, too. Dropped packets galore, signal-loss hiccups, and not enough bandwidth to make up for that by transferring large buffers really fast. Terrible for streaming. Probably way more battery-draining then than now, as well, since that kind of hardware has generally gotten a lot more efficient.…
As soon as I got an iPhone, I remember pointing Safari at an M3U link and was so happy to have streaming on a hand held device. It took many years, but it was finally doable. I was pleasantly surprised when the stream continued flowing even once the screen locked. That was still years before music apps became a thing, but I was snug as a bug listening to my website streams on mobile.
I did a little bit of streaming on a Nokia 3650, had to go down to 40kbps if i recall correctly, but the battery life would be minutes. Then my free data loophole ended and my dream of music streaming was postponed.
Re: A Prototype Original iPod
#109> We don’t know much about where it came from. That’s the most important part! How did Panic got it? Why did they had to wait 20 years? Some trade secret deal expired?
It might have something to do with the time they almost ended up selling their MP3 player Audion to Apple and turning it into iTunes.
(I would link to their story about that but it seems to have not made the transition from a standalone page on their site to their blog.)
Re: A Prototype Original iPod
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Syncing music with iTunes was so much easier than the junk sync apps that other players had.
You mean copying and pasting files that already contain metadeta? That was difficult? Because I'm pretty sure everyone universally hated the formats and auto-renamed files that iTunes forced.
Everyone except people who had better things to do than to maintain a huge library of files downloaded from KaZaa with no metadata beyond vaguely-standardized file names.