For a long time the iPod was the only device capable of making sense of the huge, chaotic mess of file people had after making "file sharing" a hobby. The competition had perfectly workable solutions for the amount of data you would get from buying CDs or doing the occasional "backup copy", but only Apple was providing tools for to comfortably deal with the massive increase in music availability. And the high price nicely fitted the inverse budget gap left when people stopped to buy music. Apple was pretty much saved by music piracy before using that position to become the biggest music distributor themselves, all while still not having properly bought the bootlegged trademark from Apple Corp.

> I wish it had won out, it was superior in every way

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.

128MB cards were out the same year the ipod was. They also cost about $30. I'll take two CDs per card over an iPod that dies if you breath on it wrong any day of the week.

EDIT: world-wide market share (that I didn't find good numbers on in first search) also was (to) surprisingly high, so my impression was clearly wrong. Still interesting that such a specific device (and thus market segment: expensive mp3 players with hard disks) dominates so much.

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.

Because iPods were 70%+ of the entire MP3 player market worldwide for years? That's certainly a valid definition of "won" in my book.

Your personal anecdotes are not data.

My original iPod still worked when my last FireWire Mac gave up.

_Every way_?

Literally every way. The only downside was having to use rhapsody to load music - but I can just barely call that a downside since there was no supported method to load music onto an iPod on Windows at that point. So you either bought a mac, or used third party software and hoped they stayed in front of the Apple DRM police.

my original iPod still works to this day, of course I haven't used it in ages.