Re:Jawbone is being liquidated as its CEO launches a related...
by maxerickson on Thursday July 06, 2017 @10:36PM
(#14715607)
I think the interface was way more important. Archos beat Apple to market with little harddrives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series#Jukebox_... ) but the player is pretty something or other looking and has a bunch of chincy buttons. Even the mechanical clickwheel was vastly better than pressing a little button a couple dozen times.
Memory is hazy, but I seem to recall that without the iTunes store/application you had to either mess around ripping CDs, or use illegal downloads.
The one hardware innovation the iPod had was to use the teeny hard drives just coming on to the market at the time, when everyone else was using flash. Flash was the right solution ultimately, but for a while the HD worked around the problem that Flash was too small for a decent set of songs. Reputedly Jobs decided to take most of the volume supply of the small drives initially, preventing copycats from executing.