My recollection of the time was that most MP3 players were based on Flash storage rather than HDDs, so I could get about 10 songs onto mine.
Macs didn't really take off as a thing until long after iPods had been mainstream for a while, so I don't think the integration was actually very important compared to the fact that there was a well known HDD-based MP3 player.
That ipod still works. Every once in a while I charge it and listen to the gentle clicking of its tiny drive.
I think the first Windows compatible iPod was the game changer. It had a large HDD but was much lighter and smaller than similar HDD-mp3 players at the time (such as the ones above).
Part fashion accessory, part music appliance, part computer, the purpose of the iPod was understood by Apple and poorly understood by their competitors.
Just like how the Walkman wasn't the first portable cassette player, or even technically the best, Sony relentlessly innovated on that form factor making smaller, lighter versions, waterproof ones, and ultimately owned that market. It wasn't until the iPod rolled around that someone displaced that position so completely.
I recall it being very difficult to explain to my peers what I was carrying. Thankfully the nomad looked like a CD player.
Sure, at that time, few people had a Mac, but certain demographics had it. And I distinctly recall that people in the office were curious about the iPod, and were impressed with the intuitive UI (with the physical scroll wheel, which was really quite nice - it had inertia and would spin a while when you spun fast).
FireWire, integration, and storage size ("all your music in your pocket") definitely played a role. Basically, if you had an iTunes library, the iPod was a total no-brainer.
(Off topic, but not that much: my sister grabbed her first iPod as a windows user approximately 12 hours after the 3G became available on the shelves here in Italy, mainly because she had been so envious of mine... so anecdotally there was quite a lot of pent-up demand, and they were smart to bottle it up to the point of explosion and then harness it.)
I mean, I had a iPod, but I used 3rd party software to load it since iTunes was mess.
Windows XP pre-dates the iPod. Windows Media Player pre-dates the iPod by over ten years.
The whole post feels like you've re-imagined a lot of the history, certainly much of it doesn't align with my experiences and impressions at the time.
Meanwhile Apple had the monstrosity that was/is QuickTime.
The reason iPod was so popular was it's form factor/UI/UX/ease of use and the iTunes Music Store.
It also needed USB to become successful, FireWire held the iPod back from mainstream adoption.
If you bought your computer in a store -- like most people in the US at the time -- instead of building your own, it came bundled with some other product: WMP at least, possibly MusicMatch, RealJukebox (eventually merged back into RealPlayer), which you were likely using. Getting your Nomad or iRiver, a comparable devices to the iPod, to work with that, was not as smooth as the iTunes-iPod combo.
Nope, Apple had had iTunes since 2001, and by the time the iPod came out, I for one had ripped most of my CDs to iTunes and basically used the Mac as the primary music machine.
Even today, iTunes still depends on QuickTime, but given I haven't used Windows in almost ten years or seriously used iTunes in almost 8 years, I couldn't tell you whether that dependency is the old QuickTime 7 API or if Apple ported a subset of the newer QuickTime APIs over I also couldn't really tell you which they use on Macs* anymore either given I prefer to avoid launching iTunes whenever possible.
That said, iTunes up to about version 6 point whatever the last point update was, was genuinely a really great jukebox on Windows. It was easy to use, loaded fast, ran fast and I ran it nearly 24/7 on my old XP machine. iTunes 7 ruined all of that, and my first indication would have been when it took over an hour to complete the install process and the first run was dog slow.
* Apple did deprecate and remove QuickTime 7 from Mac OS X, that said, I wouldn't put it past them to maintain an API in maintenance mode exclusively for their own use, particularly when it comes to maintaining the many-heads of the beast that is iTunes.
I think the OP's point was that, while you could do this stuff on Windows, it wasn't nearly as functional, seamless, or simple as it was with an iPod and iTunes or even MusicMatch (which really, really sucked, at the time).
And the Creative Nomad ZEN Xtra with 60GB was phenomenal for a reasonably sized library.
For software, I recall two options:
MediaMonkey Gold, a media player that synced with ZEN players and could automatically convert media formats.
Notmad Explorer, a software suite from Red Chair Software that allowed for file and playlist management for the ZEN players.
Microsoft took about 5 years to catch up, no small part due to USB 2.0
XP was released on 25th octobre 2001. First ipod 2 days before, on 23th october 2001.
Clearly, the install base of these products significantly contributed to the software people used to manage their portable music players. In May 2003, a Nielsen report put Winamp's install base at 5.5 million, Windows Media Player at 43.1 million, RealNetworks at 26 million, and QuickTime at 13.5 million [4][5].
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/10/business/technology-micros... [2] http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-product-marketing-says-qu... [3] http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0801/ [4] http://www.zdnet.com/article/music-players-market-share-wina... [5] https://www.cnet.com/news/aol-trumpets-new-winamp/
Which of these four things are lucky circumstances and not the product of smart, consumer-thoughtful, hard work on the part of various teams at Apple?
Why is it that Apple has been "lucky" in this way so many times when so many other companies could have won instead?
> Apple had already stolen the higher end of the market
Stolen? I realize this is just a turn of phrase, but I think it does reveal a strong bias that sees a market win by Apple as illegitimate.
That the iPod dominated the industry really shouldn't be a surprise when Sony was producing junk like the NW-E3.
That's a heck of a lot of "lucky circumstances" to call it "lucky circumstances" ;)
I'd say it was a lot of hard work delivering on a (rather novel at the time) idea that may or may not have worked. All that effort paid off in the end. Same goes for iPhone.
These two, at least, aren't it. The iPod only became truly successful once it had a USB connection and a Windows client. Before that point it was a total niche product.
The best thing about the iPod was its usability (the scrolling wheel). Mac integration is pretty irrelevant since almost everyone had a PC back in those days.
I had an iRiver H340 [1] back in those days (~2004 or so). It had decent hardware keys for control, and a whopping 40 GB of space (with a 2.5" HDD). iPods back then had a fraction of that. The iRiver h3x0 could play both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. The battery would last long enough for commuting back & forth. But it didn't have such a scrolling wheel. Nor did it have any of the DRM garbage. Nor did it receive any of the marketing or hype the iPod had. You could however just download a bunch of MP3 from a.b.mp3.* or whatever and fill your device up. Back in those days, it was even legal to "download" in my country. Or you could use EAC to rip a bunch of your CDs and have it with you on the go in a more portable... "format". Oh, and it had USB OTG. You could also pimp it with unofficial open source firmware, Rockbox [2]
Quoting Cnet's review from 2005: "It's just not as out-of-the-box simple as the iPod. If this all sounds discouraging, just remember: the H340 does so much more than the iPod." and "It's noticeably thick, not to mention heavier than it looks. (In the world of gadgets, a few ounces or fractions of inches make a difference.) The overall look is utilitarian although the color screen does add some style points. We like to call the H340 the "Soviet iPod."" [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iriver_H300_series
"Caught up"? The steaming pile that Microsoft call Windows Media Player is the sole reason I ever bought an iPod. Synching was barely worthy of the word, getting music on any of the "Plays for Sure" devices was a pain in the ass, random shit just didn't work (I recall making a playlist was damned near impossible), and to put the cherry on top, all of your Plays for Sure surely didn't play after they shut that store down. Please note for the record that I was a Kool-Aid guzzling Microsoft employee at the time. Any sane person would have given up on the first try.
So one day the wife and I headed to the local Apple Store and hooked ourselves up with a couple of Nanos. The lack of friction made long-term customers out of us.
The main competitor for Apple’s iPods was Sony. And the reason why Apple won is the fact that Sony also includes Sony Music, i.e. insisted on DRM. I think that’s why minidiscs didn’t really took off.
How is great execution "luck"?
The Windows world at the time was a big mess of nonstandard cabling, messy drivers, sketchy quasi-shareware applications vying for presence on your desktop, while the Apple world was plug-and-play over a high-speed bus that came standard, and the music management experience was top-notch. And while there was some good hardware coming out of Korea to give the iPod a run for its money, the integrated Apple experience was without match.
For Windows, Apple bundled MusicMatch Jukebox at first, but then made iTunes available on Windows, which became their foothold that would later set up the iPhone for success.
By the time Microsoft caught up with WinXP and Windows Media Player, Apple had already stolen the higher end of the market, leaving WMP largely in the domain of cheap flash-based USB sticks that could only fit a subset of your songs. Then everyone pivoted to a DRM-laden storefront, making switching costs high. A later effort to refocus their first-party efforts with Zune resulted in an incompatible DRM ecosystem, and fizzled on the market.
The iPod, in many ways, foreshadowed the Apple tactic that would become famous from the later iPhone: take the state-of-the-art in a particular market, pare it down a bit, endow it with tasteful industrial design, make sure it has a strong, ideally "frustration-free" integrated environment to take part in, give it an upmarket but justifiable price, and market the heck out of it with aspirational brand advertising.