A common criticism of Apple is they just take technology that is most of the way there, then just make it usable. Of course, making it usable is often the hardest part and adds the most value for the consumer.

As someone that considers UX and a user-centric approach to technology as their "edge" compared to most technologists, this is what keeps surprising me - because honestly it doesn't seem to me like it actually is or should be the "hardest" part at all. Compared to something like, say, solving differential equations, then I'd say that it seems fairly obvious, trivial even, to practice basic empathy and ask simple questions like "What could an average person get out of this technology?" and "How many of the technical details could we handle automatically so people don't have to bother with them yet still get most of the benefits?". At most I'd say it's the last 10-20% of the work on top of all the hard work on the tech (not because it's a small amount of work, but because the tech that comes before is so hard and time-consuming). But the company that gets the final part right gets most of the rewards (Pareto FTW!). Yet for some reason this tends to be different companies, doing the ground work and successfully commercializing the tech - why is that? Is it that hard to foster both a deeply tech-oriented and user-oriented culture in the same company? Is it too costly to invest in building expertise in both areas, so companies tend to choose one or the other? Is it because B2C is much higher risk than B2B, so it attracts a different kind of entrepreneurs?

It can take a fresh pair of eyes to look at things and see a different way forward, and then be bold enough to try. This usually involves stripping away features to make things more simple. That's not always a popular choice in engineering circles.

In technology, it's especially tricky to think about the 'average user' when you're surrounded by other technologists.

Empathy is one piece of design. But if you can't visualize different modes of operation, you can't choose the most empathetic one. I suspect the real issue is that people with both deep technology and ux skills are rare. They require you to keep two entirely different problem spaces in your head and explore them together.

Same is true for companies, with Apple one of a very few companies with deep expertise in both.

Think about the amount of "empathy" that went into the first iPhone. All of the work to design an efficient way to display information and navigate on such a small device. Pinch to zoom. Inertial scrolling. Virtual keyboard to maximize screen space when you aren't typing. Swiping to navigate. Both dreaming up solutions like this and then making them real is extremely hard work and requires a lot of skill, talent, and knowledge.

It's not clear to me that making a smaller hard drive or a faster CPU or a screen with more pixels, are necessarily harder problems to solve than the kind of user experience problems Apple tackles. (Or used to tackle, depending on your view of post-Jobs Apple.)

The Remote Solutions Personal Jukebox looks to have been the first of the models to use a laptop drive instead of small and expensive flash, but at $799 for 4.8GB, it was very pricey (1999).

The Creative NOMAD Jukebox in late 2000 had 6GB for $429.

In late 2001, Apple introduces the iPod, which at 4GB for $399, is actually not quite as good in a dollar per GB metric.

I think it's clear that it's not really the idea that made the iPod take off, but the marketing, polish, and IMO most importantly, that they had a real software company work on it rather than a bunch of EE people. Not to denigrate electrical engineers, but often it's a different type of programming that goes into UI and UX, and having people that have worked on that for years can matter quite a bit.

1: http://www.pcworld.com/article/174725/evolution_of_the_mp3_p...

I think it is important to remember that when the iPod came out, iTunes already existed. Not the iTunes store, mind you, but iTunes as a solution to (legally) rip your existing CDs (and automatically get the tags/meta-information from OCDDB or so), and manage songs downloaded from Napster (less legally).

So, people had a good platform to listen to music on the desktop, nicely managed with lots of meta-information (tags, time last played, rankings, etc).

Now, with the iPod, you could JUST PLUG IT IN, and it would download the whole shebang within a couple of minutes (via Firewire), and offer it in a nice interface. THAT was a quantum leap in usability compared with all other devices on the market at the time.

I had a minidisk player, and you could add artist and song titles manually on the device (selecting a letter at a time with a left/right cursor), and my, what a pain it was.

Just having your whole (carefully curated) music library on the go in a a few minutes on the iPod was AWESOME.

That said, it often took forever over USB, so the fast transfer speeds of FireWire was a big selling point.

Wikipedia's iTunes history [1] says iPod support came in October 2001 (i.e. when the iPod was released), and Rio One support in December 2001, and doesn't really mention other MP3 players.

At any rate, the faithfulness with which the iPod presented the iTunes music library was great.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_iTunes#iTunes_2

"download songs to popular MP3 players from Rio and Creative Labs with plug-and-play simplicity with no extra software or complicated driver installations required."

https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/01/09Apple-Introduces-...

Technically, this wasn't any more legal than recording a CD to a cassette tape. It's still an infringing copy. It's just that nobody was ever sued for it, as far as I'm aware, and it's since been legalized in some places.

There were a few CDs with anti-rip technology (including the famous Sony rootkit CDs), but the industry largely gave up on that after losing the DRM war.

If workable DRM had been deployed fast enough, neither Napster nor the iPod would have existed. That's part of why the fight against DRM is important.

But Apple was actually marketing iTunes with the slogan "Rip. Mix. Burn." and put out this awesome ad featuring De La Soul, Iggy Pop, Barry White, and others. Check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECN4ZE9-Mo

I'd add though that, while the initial iPod received a generally positive reception, there was the usual Apple critique that it was on the pricey side. And there really wasn't a general market perception right away that everything was different now. For one thing, iTunes originally ran only on Macs--and Apple wasn't saying publicly that would ever change--so iPods were mostly usable with laptops/desktops that were pretty niche at the time.

Apple figured out how to tap into the early adopters and make them influencers to bring in the early majority. Part of this was making it easier for people to be able to get music on to the thing. iTunes had just come out shortly before the iPod and started hitting its stride in tandem with the device.

iPod made a thousand songs in your pocket a reality.

Edit: And HDD density / price per MB reaching a point where storing several dozen MP3s was noticeably more convenient than swapping CDs.

Not sure how one counts innovative but Apple chose a good horse to ride for storage that led to it being in an increasingly enviable position among MP3 players. (Which Apple parlayed into popular flash players and then the iPhone.)

To me, this was the most amazing thing about the iPod. 5GB inside this tiny package... it seemed impossible before I learned about those tiny hard drives.

While thinking about this it made me feel like that is an example of a powerful force of history - "to the victor goes the spoils." There was a lot of tech foundation innovated by competitors in related products that made the iPod possible but since the iPod was the breakout success of the era it's all some of us can remember.

Oh, wait, which universe?

Steve Jobs uses the wheel to create a cart, a wheelbarrow, a chariot and eventually, a bicycle

Does my wheel invention matter more or Steve Jobs' cart invention?

Because by itself, a wheel is useless

The wheel is a platform innovation, the value of which lies mostly in its conceptual existence which enables useful applications of it. No wheel, no useful applications of the wheel.

The steam engine is another platform innovation. By itself, all a stream engine does is is sit there, eat resources, and belch white smoke. Combine it with some wheels and a large cart. Now you have a game-changing transportation method.

The big problem was the interface, it really sucked to try and navigate a couple hundred MP3s on a one-line display.

But collecting and (forever) burning collections was a royal pain in the ass. Plus, CD readers would struggle and skip/stop/jump all the time as they bounced in your pocket or in your bag.

> The big problem was the interface

Absolutely. A lot of cheap Chinese sticks wouldn't even understand filesystem structures deeper than one level. To be fair though, the iPod Shuffle was basically like that and still sold very well; the reality distortion field was in full force at that time.

Well, after the first generation of CD players they wised up and added high-speed drives that read into buffers ("skip-proof"/"ESP"/etc) so that skipping wasn't a big deal. Since MP3s were a smaller quantity of data, they actually worked better at this.

Ideally you wanted a player that could read CD-RWs (whether full of audio tracks or MP3 files). Still a pain in the ass but less expensive. Not all players used a laser that could read RW media. And not all media used to be readable by all drives in those days - some drives were very very sensitive. I remember the horror of desperately searching DVDR-Help.com to try and find media with good compatibility ratings.

The thing that always amused me as a kid was how indestructable my Sony Discman CD player was. I went through probably 4 or 5 off-brand CD and MP3-CD players that had skip-proof before I finally switched to MP3 players. Every time they'd conk out after a year or two and I'd have to fall back to that stupid skip-prone Discman. The thing was built like a tank and I wouldn't be surprised if it still worked today, 20 years later. When I replaced it with an early iRiver HDD player in 2003 I shelled out like two years of savings for it, and that iRiver ended up lasting a decade. It was an important lesson for young me: you get what you pay for.

> Absolutely. A lot of cheap Chinese sticks wouldn't even understand filesystem structures deeper than one level.

That too, but I was really thinking about the scroll-wheel there. I can still remember the interminable pain of scrolling through a giant list of albums at about 2 per second. The iPod scroll wheel and the Zen Vision M's touch-strip were massive improvements for how they let you scroll rapidly but also have fine control.

The iRiver fixed it with firmware brute-forcing (in Rockbox). All you had was a D-pad but it would scroll exponentially faster the longer you held it down, so you could actually get where you wanted to go in a reasonable amount of time. Not elegant but it worked.

Apple really wouldn't be Apple without him. He's the guy who had the goal of making a laptop with one port. He's the guy who's on board with removing the headphone jack. He's the guy making decisions that piss a lot of people off but understands what makes their products uniquely Apple.

Personally I wish the MacBook had 2 ports, but I love that Phil's philosophy is "what if we made a notebook with just one port?"

Me too, but I have come to appreciate the whole product experience. I went from the MacBook Air 13" to a MacBook 12". I cycle to work nearly daily and take my MacBook in my backpack. Yesterday I had to connect my wife's MacBook Air 13" and then I realized that I forgot how heavy it is.

If you need a laptop that is so light and thin, something's got to give. If removing a few ports and a CPU fan brings you there, it's like it is.

(Before someone says that you have the extra weight of an USB-C to display/USB-A adapter: the MacBook 12" charger is also smaller and lighter than the MacBook Air charger.)

* I've had issues with some of the cheaper ones I've tried.

The 2004 ones were touch wheels with tap sensors

It was, and still is, the best interface I've ever used for navigating through large, grouped lists.

From a technical point, that is correct. From a usability point, it isn't - because it took a previously digital control (button pressed or not) and made it feel analog (just turn the wheel).

And it's much easier to precisely navigate over large distances with an analog(-feeling) control.

Of course it wasn't only the wheel that made a difference, but it was the mindset behind it: Take things that to most engineers are functionally equivalent and choose the one that makes it easier for the user. Or find something that makes it easier for the user.

That is a lesson that many of the products of our industry are still missing. What matters is not only functionality, but how easily and intuitively I as a user can access that functionality.

The smartest thing they did with the click wheel after the wheel itself was the little clicking noise they played as you spun it. It made it feel mechanical, and gave you immediate feedback about how fast you were going.

I had one of those, and it went into the recycle bin the moment I got an iPod.

Remember that CD-R is write once, not synchronize many times.

Also, the interface...

[1] http://mikeschinkel.com/images/creative-technology.nomad-juk...

I kinda wanted an iPod when they came out, but as I grew up in a strict Dos & Windows home, that was out of the question.

Good riddance.

It had 64MB of flash storage and a parallel port connector compared to the 5GB and Firewire 400 that the iPod had, the Nomad/Yepp YP-D40 was fairly decent compared to a lot of the crap that was out there, but it didn't deserve a premium price.

Jukebox 1 had 6GB storage, USB 1.1, and came out nearly a year before iPod 1. Jukebox 2 came out the following year, had 30GB storage, and used USB 2.0.

But you're right, I did forget about the Jukebox and it was much more competitive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_500

I still like the form factor and interface, but the storage was very limited. It could also be expanded with SmartMedia cards.

Second one was this MP3 CD player:

https://www.amazon.com/RioVolt-Portable-Player-Second-Anti-S...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series

I wish I still had it so I could laugh at how big and heavy it is, with its 20gb spinning disk and those big blue rubber bumpers. Learned a lot putting different homebrew firmwares on it.

Also big shoutout to the Cowon iAudio series. Those things did sterling service for years. Just thinking of the brightly coloured menus is sending me back to my teenage days.

These days I run rockbox on an iPod. The hardware is better but rockbox is still IMHO the best interface for a portable music player.

[0] http://www.rockbox.org

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sansa_c200_series

It's my most portable FM radio. I'd rather use the FM chip on my smartphone, I know it's there, but the manufacturer could not be bothered to enable it. So I keep my little Sansa around. Only had to replace the Li-Ion battery once.

Rockbox makes it even nicer:

https://www.rockbox.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAUDIO#iAUDIO_7

Does anyone know the inside story of what ever happened to that product line? I read that Diamond sold the assets, but didn't find anything beyond that. (Though I would note that their earlier model, the PMP300, looks suspiciously like the first iPod.)

By the way, the Karma firmware was really ahead of other players of the time, supporting perfect gapless playback, Vorbis and FLAC support, and on the fly playlist editing. The iPod never got on the fly playlist editing, which I really missed when I moved over to using one from a Karma.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/27/sigmatel_rio_deal/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrekStor_Vibez

The Volt was the first MP3 player I ever owned. I loved that device. 700 MB of music, and I could burn as many CDs as I wanted... That thing was great.

Many people thought the market that would pay $600 for a phone didn't exist. I guess that's part of the power of being a recognized luxury brand - you can sell a product that's twice the cost of the alternatives, but people will be ok with buying it, because they'll have enough faith in you to deliver something that's worth that much.

What I really don't get is why Sharp/HP/etc. never made a PocketPC that had phone functionality built in)

There were many PocketPC-based smartphones (PDA-phones), even from HP and Sharp.

Also, many inexpensive phones could run third-party apps, albeit crappy Java ME-based.

Really? I remember spending quite a while comparing specs before getting an ASUS A730W. I remember a few interesting-sounding Zauruses (Zaurodes?) that were never released in the west, but nothing I could actually buy.

> Also, many inexpensive phones could run third-party apps, albeit crappy Java ME-based.

True - but they really were crappy. Whereas my PDA ran real programs - it was relatively easy to port and build existing C++ code (the UI toolkit was different, but all UI toolkits were different in those days).

HP had some iPAQ smartphones and Google tells me Sharp also produced something (for Japanese market). But yes, many manufacturers didn't make their devices available worldwide, so it depends on market. In Russia we had lots of Qtek/HTC devices.

I heard someone (maybe Jon Gruber) once say that Apple doesn't invent sliced bread, or cold cuts, or bib lettuce or condiments. They invent the sandwich.

https://hbr.org/2012/06/first-mover-or-fast-follower

I then bought a panasonic sd80 music player. Used sdcards to store music - I STILL have that panasonic player. I literally had it fly off my arm and bounce off a wall while doing sprints in a gym. Plugged it in and it was still playing. It still plays more formats in higher quality than the original iPod. Congrats on the marketing Apple, it definitely wasn't about having a superior product.

I wish it had won out, it was superior in every way. http://www.qvc.com/Panasonic-SV-SD80-e-Wear-Micro-MP3-Player...

Uh, a 64MB SD card is a lot smaller than a 5GB hard drive. The iPod stored 93x more songs. If the SV-SD80 had been able to store 1000 songs instead of ~11 songs, then navigating them would not have worked at all. The iPod was in an entirely different market.

I honestly can only name 2 people I know that owned iPods of various kinds, in an era where nearly everybody around me had some kind mp3 playing device.

Your personal anecdotes are not data.

I don't think it's very special to make a good product that's expensive. Competitors satisfy more people by making a still-pretty-good product that's less expensive.

Personally i will never buy an apple product. Mostly because of the insane prices but partially out of principal and practicality (as their products are in their own world).

There was no prelapsarian apple-of-perfection: they released amazing things and also released utter turds.

I've been pretty much exclusively Apple for 20 years (laptops) and phones (since they shipped them), and the watch (vs other fitness trackers I've used). In the aggregate they haven't sucked as much as the alternatives.

In other places (servers, wifi base stations, office software, music software) I've switched back and forth and currently don't think Apple is worth it. It doesn't have to be a religious issue.

Oh and the original iPod? It was amazing!

And how about workstations, high quality monitors, video and photo editing software?

The thing is, while Apple's main focus was never spreadsheets or enterprise SW, it once produced the go-to computers for creative professionals (musicians, photographers, video makers, designers). I believe that Apple is losing its edge in that field, because they are exclusively focusing on consumer devices and software.

The Mac Pro hasn't been updated in years; Aperture has been killed, Final Cut went from being a professional product to a "prosumer" one, Logic still seems to be doing OK but latest updates of Mac OS broke compatibility with many pieces of SW used by musicians (e.g. Ableton, NI Maschine etc), the list could go on...

When they touted the Mac Pro 2013 as a computer you could carry to a set to do editing, a friend of my quipped "Clearly no one at Apple has any fucking idea how movies or TV show are made."

That said, as long time digital musician 10.9+ hasn't been a problem for Maschine, Ableton, Cubase or Logic. I still have soft synths that are nearly 10 years old from the first Intel mac days working just fine...

It's not like they were up to date before. Old video cards, USB 2.0...

And it wasn't that great before those. The G5's were watercooled and would leak all over, not to mention slow, the G3 and G4 towers were upgraded so fast they obsoleted each other as soon as they came out, and didn't have support for all their features in OS 9.

I need more 10 more hands to count all the "iPod killers" and "iPhone killers" that were stomped.

The iRiver MP3 players were fantastic throughout most of the 2000s (unfortunate choice of name, they existed pre-iPod). They were the player of choice for the technical crowd because they supported line-in recording, optical outputs, and OGG playback (which mattered a lot more when capacities were smaller). They had an average-quality interface, usable but not amazing.

They were also one of the main bastions for the open-source Rockbox firmware, which supported a huge variety of codecs and WAV recording. Rockbox's appearance was utilitarian but it actually featured many great usability tweaks (exponential scrolling/FF/rewind, "car mode" that paused playback when power was lost, bookmarks, etc). They were an amazing player for someone who could do hardware mods. I kept mine going for a decade by swapping parts. I eventually used an adapter to plug in a CompactFlash card for a primitive SSD, and installed a high-capacity battery, which boosted the battery life to something absurd like 20 hours IIRC.

On that note I still don't actually know anything that can touch the battery life of the early iRiver flash players (iFP series). We're talking 24 hours on a single AA. I've actually been looking for a replacement with those same characteristics (extreme battery life on a single disposable AA or AAA battery cell) and coming up empty. You would really think there'd be a successor using modern electronics but everyone has gone to integrated batteries. Anyone know of one?

The Creative Zen Vision M was another really solid attempt. The scroll-strip was a worthy competitor for the (patented) Apple scrollwheel. Nice fit and finish, just couldn't make any waves in the market.

Marketing can only get you in the door for you to buy the first product. You have to actually make something good in order to get customers to come back.

(Follow the Principle of Charity, please.)

Things were much harder to disrupt then, too. It was much tougher for someone to get access to short-run PCB design and assembly services and you couldn't get SOC do-everything modules for random tasks nearly as easily back then. You really needed to be an established manufacturer who could order a big run of products and/or custom chips. The smaller you were, the smaller the production run, the more your products would cost.

Personal electronic Kickstarters are still some of the most likely to fail. There's lots of reasons for that. It's hard to execute well, and consider how easily HTC loop-the-looped Oculus' design and out-ramped their production. And that's in 2016, using a new design for a sophisticated product. China will have knockoffs of most products on Alibaba literally before your product is in stores.

There were some good competitors but it's a really, really hard market to break into, even if you've got a great product. Apple is the HTC of this scenario, they were a big company that saw a great idea they could do better and executed well, jumping ahead of the original creators.

I don't hold any particular grudge against Apple. I resent the scroll wheel being patented, but that's because I am generally opposed to design/UI elements being patentable. You shouldn't get a 30-year monopoly on something like that.

Well, that's not strictly true, is it? You have to make something which actually feels good. And iPods definitely ended up doing that.

I remember an awful product placement for the Zen on Smallville. There was some woman with a Zen. The Zen was supposed to be so alluring, it captured the eyes of the rich and powerful Lex Luthor and compelled him to approach the woman.

For a series about an alien from another planet who is faster than a speeding bullet and so forth, I found it funny that this is the scene that broke the suspension of disbelief for me.

I'm aware this is probably a fairly small market, but it's gotta be bigger than whoever's buying the current pricey Nano with its crappy faux-iOS touch interface.

Heck, lots of people given up on compact cameras, where phones are still (and will be for the foreseeable future) subpar in quality, and they will carry another device just for music that doesn't really add anything?

Tim Cook is a money guy only and as a long time apple fan and Siri user I'm bored and disappointed! Google Now is amazing and I'm longing for something more exciting then my recently bought iPhone 7.

The Pixel looks very interesting but it's only on Verizon.

If you buy one from the Google Store, it's unlocked, and it should work on most major US carriers. (See "Channels" under "Specs & More": https://store.google.com/product/pixel_phone)

Disclaimer: I work at YouTube, which is a part of Google.

The key, of course, is that a few big wins make up for a lot of that but the other side of that lesson is that most people will do better with consistent solid execution rather than spreading themselves too thin trying for a huge win. Apple could easily have been Palm or SGI if one of those long-shots hadn't paid off.

1. Our Apple higher-ed rep used to respond to critical bug reports by asking how many Macs we couldn't purchase due to that bug.