It was special (if only for Mac users initially). The first iPod did have a physically turning wheel (the capacitive sensing clickety one that came later didn't turn). It also had 5 GB and Firewire, and synced your entire iTunes music library (with meta data, including playlists IIRC) over onto the iPod in a few minutes. The UI, polish, and speed combined to an experience that was way ahead of all the other MP3 players around at the time.
Edit to add: Also, btw, other MP3 players at the time used AA batteries typically, and required manually copying over music. The iPod would recharge and automatically sync with your iTunes library (including contacts and calendars) every time it was plugged in.
> And while legit digital music downloads would set the stage for today's online music scene, digital purchases were never that big a chunk of the market and declined fairly quickly given streaming.
First came iTunes, then iPod, then later the iTunes Music Store. There were virtually no legit digital music downloads at the time the iPod came out. Most people's digital library came from Napster (illicitly) or (legit) ripping their own CDs (recall Apple's excellent "Rip. Mix. Burn." commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pleybGLgaEc ).
BTW, the UK launch was on 2001-11-22 at the London MacExpo in Islington, London.
As the story notes, it was immediately "special" due to the polish, relative ease of use, and internal micro-HDD that allowed it to store far more music than any other player with any market penetration - while some prior models also used a hard drive and offered comparable capacity, it wasn't until the iPod came along with Apple's marketing behind it that portable digital players really started to displace portable CD players.
Remember, too, this was in 2001, well before flash had gotten as cheap and reliable as we're accustomed to today, and well before anyone was in the habit of encoding at higher quality than 128Kbps MP3 could provide - 5GB in a portable music player was huge.
Apples magic is the entire packaging and intuitiveness such that every layperson can use it. But that’s not on the spec sheet…
The 2001 iPod cost 400$, but it was smaller than a CD player (4.02inx2.43inx0.78in) and could hold 1,000 songs. That’s point where it could start to kill off personal CD players.
“The Jukebox is historically notable for shipping with a user interface and operating system so unfriendly and bug-ridden as to inspire Björn Stenberg and other programmers to develop a superior, free and open-source replacement operating system. This project became Rockbox.[citation needed]”
Anybody know whether that (especially the “so unfriendly and bug-ridden” part; that Rockbox started on that device seems less controversial to me) is true?
Here for example, is a not very flattering account of the introduction from PC Magazine: https://web.archive.org/web/20011121170057/http:/www.interac...
The click wheel UI of the iPod made its large storage actually useful rather than just being a bullet point on a box. If you had a thousand songs loaded on your iPod it was pretty easy to navigate to any album, artist, or playlist.
Most other PMPs (even after the iPod) had UIs that were basically lifted from the Walkman. Navigating HDD players was a pain in the ass.
Besides the click wheel UX the iPod had iTunes doing the heavy lifting of library management. It made editing and adding metadata to songs, which helped organize your library, very easy. That same organization completely carried over to the iPod. iTunes also supported automatically syncing an attached iPod so if you ripped a CD it appeared on your iPod after plugging it in.
Most of the competing HDD based PMPs were obsessed with just acting as mass storage devices when attached to a computer. So they had painful on-device UIs dealing with the multitude of differing naming conventions and poorly tagged files.
So while HDD players weren't invented by Apple they:
1. Made an HDD player small enough to fit in a pocket competing in dimensions with Flash based players.
2. Made a UI that allowed easy navigation of a large library.
3. Used a high speed connection that made it trivial to fill the large storage. This same connection also charged the device.
4. Had a very responsive UI not limited to the seek speed of the internal HDD. The iPod let iTunes do the hard work of creating the on device database. The iPod OS didn't need to go read metadata from every file to populate menus or display song information. It did the hard work once (in iTunes) and just used the database for everything but audio data from then on.
Upgraded to a Zune after the battery on my Zen died. The screen and UI were great imo, sad it didn't stick around.
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
(for those unaware, back in 2001 Slashdot was the premier location on the internet for talking about tech. This was the summary review from the Slashdot founder, Rob Malda. It's a facinating example of how early tech adopters might understand the features, but would easilly mistake what was important in a massmarket)
Windows support followed within 9 months. Do you think it wasn't planned before launch?
Apple didn’t come out with USB support for the iPod until USB 2.0 became a common feature on PCs, with it’s theoretical speed of 480 Mb/s (in my experience of real-world use it was actually still slower than FireWire 400) and sufficient power.
And it "declined fairly quickly given streaming" because buffet streaming services basically fucked with the economics to offer a product designed to replace recording collections while paying a fraction of the price... and fractionalizing revenue to those who create the content. Or in other words, solving piracy by merging the economic model of piracy with an updated middleman model and capturing as much value as possible in between.
Other than that Sony and the Zune are all that I remember seeing and that was very rare.
There’s also the ecosystem to consider. Cars, gyms, hotels all started offering ways to connect an iPod. Accessories for iPods were everywhere.
https://qz.com/136239/making-itunes-available-for-windows-ch...
The iPod would have languished and died otherwise, and it certainly wouldn't have put Apple on track (and swelling with cash) to do iPhone later on.
Oh wait, that part didn't happen.
Well, it kind of was. It was the only player with the click wheel interface, and the only one that supported Firewire. This gave it the advantage of being generally easy to use and was very fast and convenient to load music. It also looked pretty good (I wanted one the minute I saw it).
With the downsides being that 1. it was pretty expensive and 2. that it had an in built hard-drive that didn't really enjoy being bumped about too much (my 3rd gen died with the HDD) so you had to treat it carefully.
However they iterated pretty quickly after that, adding Windows support, USB, colour hi-res screens and massively reducing the size whilst also reducing the price. All of this allowed them to outstrip the competition so much that they were pretty soon one of the very few players left in that market.
When Apple made iTunes for Windows, Steve Jobs called it “It's like giving somebody a glass of hell in ice water.” [1]
I mean, was Windows Media Player really that bad? I still miss the visualizations and even the fancy skins. iTunes in comparison was very dull and barely changed in 20 years.
And WMP was awful, and got more awful each time. Winamp on the other hand was great, it really kicked the llama's ass.
It is probably the primary reason I told the spouse to “get in the car, we’re going to the Apple Store to buy iPods.” As a Microsoft employee at the time, I’d had my fill of trying to make Microsoft’s shit music player ecosystem work out of some misplaced sense of company loyalty. Playlists wouldn’t sync, and all kinds of that ilk I’ve long since forgotten. And that’s before we get to PlaysForSure…
There was a 4-year stretch where paid downloads were the leading source of revenue for the music industry.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billrosenblatt/2018/05/07/the-s...
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/4713/global-recorded-musi...
https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/4713/global-recorded-musi...
I don’t know what was so special about the 4th generation clock wheel though…
And while legit digital music downloads would set the stage for today's online music scene, digital purchases were never that big a chunk of the market and declined fairly quickly given streaming.