Re:20 years of the iPod
by fumar on Sunday October 24, 2021 @11:59AM
(#28979123)
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.
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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.