The story goes that IBM (?) shopped the hard drive around and no one was interested except for Apple. It’s still the lack of vision by other manufacturers.

Also remember that the iPod wasn’t an immediate hit and it only sold 1 million in total in its first two years. It wasn’t until two years later when it was made available on Windows.

Apple did the same with Flash storage before the iPod Nano came out. Any of its larger competitors at the time could have had the vision to see that flash based players were the future and ensure they had the supply.