Exactly. The same argument gets peddled out against any Apple product. There was a capacitive touch screen phone before the iPhone. There were app stores before the iPhone’s. There were music players with X before the iPad. Rinse and repeat.

Apples magic is the entire packaging and intuitiveness such that every layperson can use it. But that’s not on the spec sheet…

Apples magic is their advertising. They could sell shit to a horse.

The Archos Jukebox 6000 had 6GB HDD as a portable mp3 player one year earlier than the iPod.

The Archie Jukebox 6000 was freaking huge because it used a laptop sized HDD. It was portable much like a boom box was portable, but at the size of a CD player and a small stack of CD’s it wasn’t clearly better.

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.

Exactly, the Archie Jukebox didn't fit into a jeans pocket. There were MP3 players that did fit into a jeans pocket, but they used flash, which at the time only had the capacity for a few CDs at most. So, it was the iPod with which you could carry your entire music library (or a good chunk of it, nearly 100 CDs) in your pocket.

Wikipedia also claims (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archos_Jukebox_series):

“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?

Yes, but nobody ever heard of it until it was mentioned as an also-ran in Wikipedia's article about DAPs. (That said, I did just finish updating my prior comment to reflect that the iPod wasn't the first HDD-based player to market, but I think it is still fair to say it was the first one that mattered.)

Kids had MP3 players before the iPod. I remember them in high school and yes they were a known music player alternative to CDs. The iPod landed with a unified marketing campaign that promoted itself as a music device vs an MP3 player. The marketing campaign was sleek and different.

But those flash based MP3 players didn't have much storage (certainly not several GB), and typically had a terrible UI, if they could handle meta data (song, artist, album, genre) at all.

Before the iPod, a DAP was an alternative to a Discman. After, it was the other way around - at first for rich kids whose families could afford the requisite Macs for iTunes, but once iTunes for Windows came out, a Discman was what you had if you were poor.

Even if they weren't nearly as ubiquitous as they would become, people absolutely had heard of DAPs before the iPod came out. And, like the iPhone, it took 2 or 3 generations before it was obvious to a lot of people that this was something different--in part because of the ecosystem.

Here for example, is a not very flattering account of the introduction from PC Magazine: https://web.archive.org/web/20011121170057/http:/www.interac...

And just for some context. I had a Rio MP3 flash player that came with 32mb of storage around that time. mb, not gb. Like 10 songs of space. I bought a 64mb card with it that cost more than the player did and setup some sort of thing with smart playlists in iTunes to create a playlist of 64mb of music from stuff I hadn't played recently so it could copy over with as little wasted space as possible.

The Creative NOMAD Jukebox was released in 2000 and had a 6GB hard drive.

It was fucking huge and was USB 1.1 so it took forever to load music on it. The originals iPod was much smaller (using a microdrive) and only supported FireWire. It could load music as fast as the drive could write.

And that is unrelated to the point that the iPod was a clone of existing tech. You might have liked it more, but that doesn't change the arrow of time.

The iPod as a clone of existing technology is uncharitable to the point of being foolish about it. Like so many successful products implementation is more important than a bill of materials.

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.

The NOMAD used a large laptop drive that wasn't pocketable and used a lot of power. Apple bought exclusive music player rights to Toshiba's tiny drive giving them a temporary monopoly.

You could take it apart though which was nice. When mine was on it's last legs, hard-drive clicking to death, I swapped in a cheap 250gb laptop drive and could finally carry all of my music library around instead of having to pick and choose.

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.