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.