Straight Dope on the IPod's Birth

Re:Straight Dope on the IPod's Birth by irons on Thursday August 12, 2010 @06:38PM (#1599443)

You're missing the point. The genius of the iPod, and the reason it neatly destroyed all of its competitors for years, was that it offloaded complexity, like adding music and editing metadata, to a general-purpose computer. The only things the iPod did were things it was good at.

Whether such complexity belongs on a general-purpose computer or in the cloud is orthogonal to the choice Apple made, which is to put the complexity not-on-the-device.

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Re:Straight Dope on the IPod's Birth by ZeroGravitas on Friday August 13, 2010 @05:24AM (#1600475)

All the competitors did the same thing. I'm not even sure what "adding music" without a computer would look like. Apple just streamlined and simplified it by assuming you'd use their products from end to end (iPod - Mac - iTunes).

That means removing features from the device was balanced by adding them to another Apple product i.e. it wasn't orthogonal at all, it was part of the digital hub strategy that could be considered to be holding them back now.

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