[HN Gopher] 20 years of the iPod
___________________________________________________________________
20 years of the iPod
Author : ingve
Score : 56 points
Date : 2021-10-23 11:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Microsoft is still working on a Zune 'iPod killer'.
| iso1210 wrote:
| The most famous use of a Zune is almost certainly the quip in
| Guardians of the Galaxy 2 -- "It's called a Zune. It's what
| everybody's listening to on Earth nowadays. It's got three
| hundred songs on it."
|
| The ipod, perhaps more than google, was the harbinger of the
| downward spiral of microsoft's iron grip on the tech industry.
| ghaff wrote:
| The somewhat remarkable thing to me--and maybe it reflects
| how large dominant companies _can_ be very resilient to
| market changes and competition--is that, under Nadella,
| Microsoft has been able to largely thrive. _In spite of_
| basically losing mobile in multiple form factors and device
| types, to say nothing of search, maps, etc.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > say nothing of search, maps, etc.
|
| They're too busy selling OS licensees, Office licenses,
| cloud services, and running Xbox break-even.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That is due to increased download bandwidth everywhere,
| especially due to advances in mobile network technology,
| meant that computing could be offloaded from devices to the
| cloud. Of course, the cloud requires huge capital
| expenditures, and who better to capitalize on it than the
| incumbent giants.
| sorenjan wrote:
| I think the iPod competed more with Sony than Microsoft.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| directly sure, but it was a catalyst to apple's climb to
| the position it holds now.
| zafiro17 wrote:
| Fond memories of my click wheel ipod, but I actually just bought
| a relatively generic MP3 player and am thrilled with it. Wrote
| about it here:
| https://therandymon.com/index.php?/archives/360-The-MP3-Play...
|
| The hardware/software are nowhere as slick as that old ipod. But
| the freedoms this device give me serve as a reminder that all of
| the constraints of an ipod (one per user, no library comingling,
| needs itunes, etc.) were artificially imposed by a hardware
| striving to maximize hardware sales (and placate the music
| industry).
| FabHK wrote:
| > constraints of an ipod (one per user)
|
| Do you mean one user per iPod? (because you could obviously
| have many iPods per user... Apple certainly didn't object :)
|
| But yes, you couldn't use iPods to merge iTunes libraries among
| friends. For that, you needed an external hard drive (and you
| could mount the original iPod as an external hard drive and
| copy the music over, but then those mp3s were seen as data, not
| music, and could not be played...). And once the iTunes music
| store got introduced, music you bought there was DRM'd, so that
| complicated things further.
|
| But I don't think it was deliberately designed to "maximize
| hardware sales". You could easily wipe it and sync to another
| user in a few minutes (the original Firewire had 100 to 400
| Mbit/s, so say 3 to 10 minutes to replace the entire 5 GB
| library, so quicker than charging it).
|
| I'd venture that the constraints were demanded by the music
| industry, not imposed by Apple to maximise hardware sales (how
| is "needs iTunes" maximising hardware sales?).
| corin_ wrote:
| From your blog:
|
| > _Finally, here 's what drove the purchase: I was taking a
| long car trip, and my wife was doing the DJ work using my
| device. Of course, every time she wanted to change tracks I had
| to unlock the device with my fingerprint. Ridiculous. This
| little device solved that problem_
|
| Wouldn't telling her your phone's code, or temporarily adding
| one of her fingerprints to it for the duration of the journey,
| have been a much simpler solution...?
| tartoran wrote:
| Apple devices are very personal. There may be guest modes but
| that's not the point, they are too multipurposed and yet
| artificially limited. A good generic music player is a
| straight forward stand alone device. Where they fail is where
| the content is online on some service
| corin_ wrote:
| Sure, but the complaint was written as it being annoying
| having to constantly unlock it for her to have access to
| it, not wanting to prevent her from having access to it.
| tempodox wrote:
| And now, iFumes^W Apple Music is ruining it all. More profits for
| Apple, worse experience for users.
| smoldesu wrote:
| C'mon, don't you want to hear the new Billie Eilish album in
| Dolby Atmos? Guess you aren't a _true_ audiophile then...
| tempodox wrote:
| If it were only that. Have you tried the iPhone Music app
| with something _not_ downloaded from Apple Music or the
| iTunes store? Like, music sampled from CDs or bought on
| Bandcamp or somewhere else? It will challenge your
| creativity.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I have an iTunes library that I've been working on since at
| least 2004 that contains music from all sorts of sources,
| including tracks from Apple Music and recent additions from
| bandcamp. Haven't had any issues. The UI indicating what
| has/hasn't synced with the cloud could be better, but
| otherwise it's fine.
|
| I don't feel like Apple Music is particularly pushy either,
| at least compared to Spotify. Music.app also doesn't have
| its UI changing constantly for no reason, also unlike
| Spotify.
| pram wrote:
| Yes, I download it from Bandcamp and iTunes Match adds it
| to the rest of my devices. Easy!
| tempodox wrote:
| Ah, another subscription. Things like that used to work
| without having to pay ransom. Apple deliberately
| deteriorated the user experience to bully us into buying
| those subscriptions.
| ch_sm wrote:
| I think they've quietly integrated it into Apple Music?
| Haven't paid for iTunes Match in like 5 years, and it
| still works fine.
| FabHK wrote:
| If you manage your music library via iTunes, you can sync
| with USB or WiFi and not pay at all, just like back in
| 2001 (though back then it was Firewire).
| rideontime wrote:
| Is iTunes Match a separate subscription? I'm not happy
| with Google Music ever since they rolled it into Youtube
| Music, which has similar issues as the Music app now,
| where they're more interested in selling you more
| subscriptions than letting you play the music you already
| own. But I'm already paying for iCloud storage, so can I
| just use the space I'm already paying for to store my
| music?
| FabHK wrote:
| It is a separate subscription [1], and hardly advertised
| at all anymore. I use it instead of Apple Music, and pay
| 188 HKD/a, that's around US$ 25 per year.
|
| Here's basically what it does:
|
| * you add your music library to it.
|
| * what it recognises, it matches, and upgrades to 256
| kbit/s AAC encoded quality.
|
| * what it doesn't recognise, it uploads and stores.
|
| * all of it is now available on all your devices (and you
| can download/delete local copies at will).
|
| I was thinking of "upgrading" to Apple Music (as part of
| Apple One), and I'd hate if that functionality
| (specifically the uploading/syncing of "unmatched" songs)
| were removed!
|
| [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204146
| dehrmann wrote:
| If we're going all nostalgic, remember the free ipod sites?
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Fun fact: the software, or at least the filesystem code, for the
| original IPod was developed on Windows because the ARM toolkit
| was windows based
|
| https://corecursive.com/063-apple-2001/#the-first-day
| gumby wrote:
| For some reason they chose the official ARM dev kit which was
| indeed windows based. But there has been a great GCC based dev
| tool chain since forever.
|
| I do my embedded development pretty much exclusively using GCC
| on the Mac or Linux.
| sn_master wrote:
| Fun fact 2: Most of Google was using Windows in the early 2000s
| because of the need for Outlook and similar software that was
| Windows-only as well.
|
| Even now that Macs are an option in most FAANG+, most non-
| fresh-grad hires either pick Linux or Windows machines and
| completely avoid Macs.
| ghaff wrote:
| >completely avoid Macs
|
| As someone who normally attends quite a few tech conference
| events, that doesn't square remotely with what I see. Macs
| are out of all proportion to their percentage in the world at
| large. While it's harder to have an inventory of the rest, I
| assume they're mostly Linux given that one hardly ever sees a
| speaker presenting from a Windows laptop. [ADDED: This is in
| the context of events that are not Microsoft-centric.]
| wk_end wrote:
| My understanding is that MacBooks are much less popular
| outside of North America, where they are indeed ubiquitous.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's entirely possible. I go to a fair number of
| European events but there are a lot of North Americans at
| them as well. I wouldn't be at all surprised if pricing
| made MacBooks even more premium outside the US.
| short12 wrote:
| I wouldnt call them ubiquitous in north America by any
| stretch of the imagination. Popular in very specific
| fields and I agree. Their market share in the USA is 16
| percent. That's getting clobbered by windows primarily
| leobg wrote:
| I remember a story where a journalist sent an email with a
| tracking pixel to Tim Cook and it reported the user agent as
| being a Windows PC running Outlook.
| deanCommie wrote:
| Most exec email goes through an executive assistant filter.
| With C-execs, usually a team.
| [deleted]
| jboy55 wrote:
| In support for your first sentence, Macs were very unusual
| for techs in the valley until OSX. I ran a linux laptop for a
| long time until I gave in and stopped doing my own IT and got
| a Macbook.
| anthk wrote:
| In the USA, in the rest of the world Mac is just the machine
| to code against iOS and nothing else.
|
| Most media producers today switched to Windows.
| tempodox wrote:
| Indeed, if you do embedded development it's somewhere between
| hard and impossible to avoid Windows, although it's still a
| horrific platform for software development compared to Linux or
| even macOS. Many tools are Windows-only or Windows-first.
| wila wrote:
| Also see: https://panic.com/blog/a-prototype-original-ipod/
| mobilio wrote:
| And was used in some spy activities:
|
| https://tidbits.com/2020/08/17/the-case-of-the-top-secret-ip...
| mobilio wrote:
| Original discussion is here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188791
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm tempted to say that this story uses hindsight to maybe give
| Apple at least a bit too much credit. When the iPod first came
| out it wasn't anything obviously special. The famous clicky wheel
| didn't come until I think the 4th generation and I believe iTunes
| was originally Mac only. And Macs were pretty fringe at the time.
|
| 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.
| wwweston wrote:
| Digital sales out-revenued streaming until sometime 2014ish,
| and there was a window in which that happened while it also
| beat out physical formats.
|
| 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.
| simonh wrote:
| So what I'm getting from this thread is there are no reasons
| why the iPod would become successful, would go on to dominate
| the portable music player market and reconcile the music
| publishers with digital downloads. In fact, it seems most
| likely that those things didn't happen at all, and if they did
| it was because of Apple's magic marketing which is cheating,
| rather than real reasons.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| I can hardly recall anyone having an MP3 player that wasn't an
| iPod when I was young.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| If you remember the Zune you're talking about a later period.
| The Zune wasn't introduced until 2006, just before the
| iPhone. The other MP3 players people are talking about here
| were early 2000s.
| sgerenser wrote:
| The very first iPod had a clickwheel. It took a few generations
| before it was touch sensitive instead of a physically rotating
| wheel.
| [deleted]
| petepete wrote:
| The first two generations had a ring of buttons around the
| wheel rather than a touchwheel; menu at the top, play/pause
| at the bottom and skip backwards and forwards on the left and
| right. The third gen moved these buttons to between the wheel
| and the screen. Fourth was clicky wheel, I believe.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Click wheel was Apple's term for the touch sensitive wheel
| with integrated buttons. But reviews praised the iPod's
| interface before the click wheel.
| tda wrote:
| Am I the only one who considered the touch wheel a
| regression? I really liked my iPod with physical clicky
| spinning wheel
| uxp100 wrote:
| No, it was a common complaint at the time when the touch
| wheel was introduced. They became a lot more ubiquitous
| after the touch wheel introduction though, but I don't
| think that was directly related...
| FabHK wrote:
| The spinning wheel also had some inertia, which was really
| neat. You could give it a good spin and it would slowly
| "roll out". I think they tried to emulate that with the
| round capacitive touch thingy ("click wheel"), but that
| wasn't quite as nice. I guess it was more dust/dirt/water
| resistant, though.
| robertoandred wrote:
| The first iPod had the wheel, which was the revelation. The
| later clickwheel was just an iteration. And the iPod had
| FireWire, which meant you didn't have to wait all day to move
| your music over USB.
| Voline wrote:
| USB 1.1 moved data at 12 Mb/s and carried insufficient power
| to charge an iPod. Whereas FireWire shifted data at 400 Mb/s.
| That difference was huge.
|
| 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.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Sometimes I forget how painfully slow usb 1.x was! I had an
| external drive and copying a few cds worth of music would
| take hours.
| limeblack wrote:
| If you are including YouTube streaming then yes ad revenue from
| this wasn't that late to the game, but Spotify and pandora took
| over a decade to grow any meaningful market share.
|
| https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/4713/global-recorded-musi...
| enjoy-your-stay wrote:
| >I'm tempted to say that this story uses hindsight to maybe
| give Apple at least a bit too much credit. >When the iPod first
| came out it wasn't anything obviously special.
|
| 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.
| FabHK wrote:
| > When the iPod first came out it wasn't anything obviously
| special.
|
| 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.
| joezydeco wrote:
| iTunes for Windows is what made Apple a trillion dollar
| company.
|
| 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.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Remember when they made iMessage for Android and WhatsApp
| never happened?
|
| Oh wait, that part didn't happen.
| TomVDB wrote:
| I wasn't a Mac user back then, but when the original iPod was
| revealed, I was blown away by its looks, and it was something
| we talked about at the office.
|
| I don't know what was so special about the 4th generation clock
| wheel though...
| iso1210 wrote:
| > When the iPod first came out it wasn't anything obviously
| special.
|
| 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)
| ghaff wrote:
| While true, Apple also iterated (and took advantage of higher
| capacity disk drives). It took until the 4th generation to
| get the iconic version of the click wheel. It also took some
| time for Apple to offer iTunes on Windows. So while some of
| us could have been more forward looking at the time, it
| wasn't obviously a world-changing product out of the gate.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| The iPod's wheel was distinctive immediately. The click
| wheel was just a refinement.
|
| Windows support followed within 9 months. Do you think it
| wasn't planned before launch?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I thought the 1st generation had the best _click_ wheel.
| sn_master wrote:
| > iTunes was originally Mac only
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://500ish.com/a-time-to-kill-itunes-2d9a24529b9a
| iso1210 wrote:
| Your link puts the quote "It's like giving somebody a glass
| of ice water in hell", which makes far more sense.
|
| And WMP was awful, and got more awful each time. Winamp on
| the other hand was great, it really kicked the llama's ass.
| dwighttk wrote:
| whips, not kicked
| ghaff wrote:
| There were decidedly better programs than iTunes for Windows
| PCs. At the time, I was very into curating the genres etc. of
| my music collection and used a program called J River Media
| Center or something like that. I only stopped using it when
| Apple essentially made it impossible for 3rd party programs
| to be fully functional.
| mikestew wrote:
| _I mean, was Windows Media Player really that bad?_
|
| 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...
| pram wrote:
| WMP was terrible as a music player. That's why Winamp and
| Foobar exist.
| throwanem wrote:
| > When the iPod first came out it wasn't anything obviously
| special.
|
| 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_.
| phh wrote:
| The Archos Jukebox 6000 had 6GB HDD as a portable mp3 player
| one year earlier than the iPod.
| throwanem wrote:
| 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_.)
| ghaff wrote:
| 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/we
| b/20011121170057/http:/www.interac...
| fumar wrote:
| 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.
| throwanem wrote:
| 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.
| FabHK wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| FabHK wrote:
| 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.
| Someone wrote:
| 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 Bjorn 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?
| ghaff wrote:
| The Creative NOMAD Jukebox was released in 2000 and had a 6GB
| hard drive.
| cma wrote:
| 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.
| ricw wrote:
| 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...
| paulcole wrote:
| > digital purchases were never that big a chunk of the market
|
| 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...
| ghaff wrote:
| I guess it depends on the source of the numbers. Eyeballing
| this chart [1] it doesn't look as if downloads were ever the
| majority. (In any case, they weren't for long.)
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/4713/global-recorded-
| musi...
| sn_master wrote:
| I still use my iPod Nano 7th Gen. It's just beautiful. Very
| lightweight, no Internet distractions, the hardware buttons for
| volume and next/prev are excellent to use when it's in your
| pocket, the screen is just the right size for showing and
| navigating names of albums and songs.
|
| Only thing its missing is LDAC for Bluetooth. The difference is
| noticeable when you have headset that actually supports it.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| The last ipod nano must be one of the most beautiful products
| that Apple ever made. A fantastic screen, unrivalled touch and
| extreme thinness conspire to make it an audio player that
| nothing else even approaches. It's tragic that it's such a dead
| end now. I hope one day Apple revives it because it's one of
| the most complete products out there. (more memory wouldn't
| hurt though)
| justinator wrote:
| Can you use one of those dongles made for a car stereo?
| extra88 wrote:
| I used a Nano _5th_ gen, the last to have a clickwheel, until
| 2019. It was primarily for use at the gym but because I mostly
| listened to podcasts and didn 't want to try to keep everything
| synced with Mac, Nano, and iPhone, it was the only thing I used
| for portable audio.
|
| I've switched to using an Apple Watch to have wireless
| headphones but it's not great; syncing to the Watch's storage
| (I don't want my phone on me at the gym) is slow and the
| Podcast app can be wonky. Just today it stopped playing an
| episode in the middle for no apparent reason and I couldn't get
| it to start again. Some of this may be because it's a Series 1
| Watch but newer models seem too expensive for possibly not that
| much better an experience.
| Voline wrote:
| I also don't want to take my expensive and distracting iPhone
| to the gym. To this day I use an iPod Shuffle. I have one
| playlist that I change over time in iTunes, sync up, and play
| on shuffle. And a new-in-box Shuffle pod in a drawer for when
| this one dies.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| First iPod was 2001; first iPhone was 2007.
|
| Apple developed a category of their own, and then killed it
| themselves.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| It never pays to be perfect. The ipod nano evolved to become
| everything it could possibly be and then died a natural death
| of stagnation mixed with increasing irrelevance. I wonder if
| the smartphone will reach a similar equilibrium until the
| manufacture and os become irrelevant. Obviously Big Tech are
| trying hard to tip the balance the other way so that their
| platforms grow ever more apart and increasingly isolated.
| ghaff wrote:
| I assume a smartphone successor would involve wearables that
| make a palm-sized slab of glass in your pocket unnecessary.
| Don't really see that on the horizon but most people have
| only owned a smartphone for 10 years or so at this point so
| these technology shifts are over very short periods of time
| by historical standards.
| simonh wrote:
| Replacing something in your pocket isn't really the
| problem, the watch with a built in cellular connections can
| already do that just fine. It's replacing a 6"+ touch
| screen retina display in your hands that's the problem. So
| far wearables have no answer to that.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes, it's about the interface.
| sn_master wrote:
| Don't forget iPod touch which allowed Apple to slowly develop
| most of the iPhone features (e.g touch UI) and test it with
| customers before announcing the iPhone.
| paulcole wrote:
| The iPod Touch (September 2007) was announced after the
| iPhone (June 2007).
| ghaff wrote:
| What probably most killed the market for the iPod Touch is
| that, once the iPhone was out in the market for a few
| years, hand me down phones replaced the need to buy a new
| Touch.
| Causality1 wrote:
| The ipod didn't shuffle music and tech into a new era. The iTunes
| store did. The iTunes store could've turned any PMP into a titan.
| One could even argue it was Rio's successful legal defense of the
| concept of a PMP that laid the foundation for the entire
| industry.
| thrower123 wrote:
| The window of people who will be nostalgic about iPods is smaller
| than those who have nostalgia for 8-track tapes.
|
| It's an entire product category that swept in and had less than a
| decade of relavence before getting washed out in the tide.
| ghaff wrote:
| Of course, most people haven't had smartphones for more than a
| decade at this point. (Certainly not much longer on the outside
| especially if you exclude Blackberries.) Not that smartphones
| are likely to evaporate anytime soon.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I guess they were really only relevant for maybe 5 years,
| ~2005-2010. It primed Apple to make the iPhone (which is huge),
| but it ended up being a bridge technology between CDs and
| streaming.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Spotify launched in the US in July 2011, that is well into
| the smartphone era. By then the iPhone 3g had been out for
| about 2 years.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| A shame the only option today is the iPod Touch. Might as well
| just use an old phone...
| gumby wrote:
| TIL there is still an iPod for sale.
| drewg123 wrote:
| I love Louis Rossman's video about why he does not use Apple
| products. Near the beginning, he talks about how he worked in a
| recording studio, and people would bring in background music they
| wanted to sing along with on MP3 players, and he was used to just
| copying files off. Which worked just fine until he encountered
| his first iPod:
|
| https://youtu.be/sfrYOWlKJ_g?t=163
| FabHK wrote:
| FWIW, you can trivially pirate music from an iTunes library [1]
| with an external hard drive or USB stick or, in fact, an iPod
| mounted as an external drive. You could also play music from an
| iPod that was plugged in, IIRC, which should have been enough
| for the recording studio/karaoke use case. But you couldn't
| just copy music from an iPod to your own library, indeed (I
| doubt the music industry would've gone along with that for very
| long, either).
|
| [1] except DRM'd music, such as music purchased on the iTunes
| Store between its debut in 2003 and 2009.
| laurent92 wrote:
| The other mp3 players didn't get MPAA's approval because they
| allowed copying music, ie "they were tools for piracy".
|
| Apple's system was genius: It could only synchronize with the
| system it came from, making it a peripheral of the computer,
| not a node in a network. This restriction lived on for the
| iPhone, making Apple fans curse and Android fans laugh, when a
| computer was required to install an iPhone, for years and years
| after it wasn't technically necessary. But binding with 1 (one)
| computer was the agreement if Apple wanted to host music under
| benevolence from the labels.
|
| Apple would have never been able to get agreements with music
| labels if the iPod had been open. And thus, it lived on, while
| all other mp3-player brands died.
|
| It is a consequence of the music industry and an emergent
| property of IP laws, not a standalone decision from Apple, as
| opposed to making all their products closed-source, which they
| don't have to.
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