Your recollection matches mine. I got my first 2nd gen ipod when I was using windows and when it still came bundled with musicmatch (which was worse than any version of itunes). Ecosystem was not a consideration, storage space and ease of use were. The huge screen, clean UI and clickwheel were a major improvement over contemporary mp3 players.

That ipod still works. Every once in a while I charge it and listen to the gentle clicking of its tiny drive.

There were certainly HDD-Mp3 players around before the iPod (I used to own a Creative Nomad Jukebox and then the excellent Archos Jukebox which even allowed you to flash open source firmware on it).

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).

Apple might streamline their offerings, simplify them dramatically, but they also aggressively update it. Where the Nomad came out and was incrementally improved the iPod got re-invented several times, often cannibalizing its own market share in the process.

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.

you are correct. I was on my second HDD-Based mp3 player before the Ipod came around. I Also had the Nomad and replaced it with the Zen. Googling I see dozens of models, but I believe it was the Zen Xtra. I still have it in a box of old electronics.

I recall it being very difficult to explain to my peers what I was carrying. Thankfully the nomad looked like a CD player.

I got the iPod the day it came out in the UK (2001-11-22, London MacExpo, Islington), plugged it into my Mac, and in short order had all my iTunes music on it, including playlists (remember: iTunes was there before the iPod; Apple even had a "Rip, Mix, Burn" commercial [1]).

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.

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

iTunes on Windows was generally better than most things on Windows. Musicmatch was pretty decent though.

The fact that you knew only one person with a Mac when the iPod came out really makes you rather unsuited to speak about what went on with the iPod in the greater Mac community at a time when the iPod was exclusive to Macs. You are falling prey to the availability heuristic[1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

That’s a very harsh statement. I was the only person I knew with a Mac when I started using them in 2002 (coming from OpenStep on an x86 machine, so hardly the prototypical ‘switcher’). It's probably fairly typical that in the very late 1990s or very early 2000s some high proportion of switchers (particularly those working outside of certain lines of work such as DTP or video editing) found themselves in contexts where they themselves were the only person on the platform, these people are literally those that jump-started the gradual shift towards the Mac as a revived platform.

Certainly, my point was that the Mac community was not particularly relevant to the success of the iPod, due to its small size, and the growth of the iPod far outpaced the growth of Mac computers.

Enabling that supra-Mac growth of iPod sales was precisely the reason why starting with the iPod 3G Apple shifted from FireWire to USB and began supporting filesystems beyond HFS+.

(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.)

Clearly there was pent up demand, my main argument is that "integration" wasn't the reason for the demand, as evidenced by the huge spike of iPod sales, rather than iPod + Mac sales.

I mean, I had a iPod, but I used 3rd party software to load it since iTunes was mess.