Yes, article is from July when Apple discontinued the iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle.
Wired (I think) sometimes pulls out old stories and puts them on their homepage along with the news, poster might not realized.
Side note, I still have one of those iPod Shuffles around somewhere. Great little device to clip on your running shorts, but it had the weirdest cable. They mapped 4 USB pins onto a TRRS connector and synced it through the headphone jack.
A case where the knock offs were sometimes better than the original in my opinion. Where the iPod you still had to use iTunes to get music on to the device, but could otherwise use it as a USB drive(can't remember if you had to specifically allocate space for that or if all free space was available), but on the cheap Chinese knockoffs, you just had the file system on the USB stick where you could dump files and a mp3 files alike and it would shuffle what ever mp3 files it found on there.
The iTunes reliance was annoying in general, but it seemed even more out of placed with the "USB stick" shuffle.
You were able to install Rockbox (an aftermarket ROM for Apple, Sansa, and a few other mp3 players). Was quite good, had better codec support (played OGG files!) and you could write apps [1] for it.
[1]. Don't know if you could call them apps, as they needed to be rebuilt with the OS (don't remember if they were pluggable modules or you literally had to rebuild the OS if you wanted to write an App, but it came out of the box with a few apps and games, and you could write your own in C. Their API was weaker than Android's, but to me more enjoyable.)
Many people think that way, but I really much prefer to organise my music in iTunes than in the file system. (Even with iTunes, you can always go down to the file system if you want to, but try making a smart playlist in the file system alone...)
(Granted though that iTunes has become way too crowded with functionality now.)
> Many people think that way, but I really much prefer to organise my music in iTunes than in the file system.
iTunes + filesystem aren't the only two options. At the time, I usually had my library set up in Winamp and XMMS, and iTunes was annoyingly opinionated about what the structure of the library should be. I would've liked the option to use something besides iTunes.
> Wired (I think) sometimes pulls out old stories and puts them on their homepage
Ugh CNN does this too (along with changing the "updated time" and healines) to look like they have more content than they actually do. No doubt it's smart but really annoying when you realize you've clicked an article thats really old.
The iPod is the closest thing to an electronic device I wouldn't change that I've ever owned [1]. It wasn't perfect, but it almost was for me. I bought an extra iPod classic and shuffle when they were discontinued.
[1]: I'll qualify that I mean something with a screen and a user interface, because I once had a toaster oven that was pretty great
I love my Apple Watch but I don't get the same sense of wonder and amazement that I did from my 3rd generation iPod (wedding present). And neither does anyone that I show it to (people were blown away when I scrolled through the songs I had on that iPod).
With a very important caveat: it takes FOREVER to sync not-very-many songs with the watch. This isn't a problem if you're bringing your phone as well, but if you're going for run and don't want to or can't bring your phone, you either have to plan ahead or stick with the same ol' songs every single time you're out and about.
To be fair, I tend to stick with the same songs anyway, it makes it easy for me to always know how I'm doing with regards to my run, without having to look at the watch or wait for a mile / km update to come along, since I know when in the playlist I should be when reaching certain parts of my track. (Provided I run the same track, that is, but usually I do.)
Unfortunately, LTE for Series 3 isn't available everywhere and specifically it's not available in my country. From what I hear, it probably won't happen anytime soon either, if ever. :o(
Having a series 0 apple watch myself, part of the reason I stopped using it was how big a pain in the butt it is when you need to do anything with it. X_X Especially if you do a major enough update on your phone that the watch needs to be re-paired.
A lucky set of circumstances led to the iPod dominating the digital audio player market: bold marketing, a smaller HDD form factor, high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs.
The Windows world at the time was a big mess of nonstandard cabling, messy drivers, sketchy quasi-shareware applications vying for presence on your desktop, while the Apple world was plug-and-play over a high-speed bus that came standard, and the music management experience was top-notch. And while there was some good hardware coming out of Korea to give the iPod a run for its money, the integrated Apple experience was without match.
For Windows, Apple bundled MusicMatch Jukebox at first, but then made iTunes available on Windows, which became their foothold that would later set up the iPhone for success.
By the time Microsoft caught up with WinXP and Windows Media Player, Apple had already stolen the higher end of the market, leaving WMP largely in the domain of cheap flash-based USB sticks that could only fit a subset of your songs. Then everyone pivoted to a DRM-laden storefront, making switching costs high. A later effort to refocus their first-party efforts with Zune resulted in an incompatible DRM ecosystem, and fizzled on the market.
The iPod, in many ways, foreshadowed the Apple tactic that would become famous from the later iPhone: take the state-of-the-art in a particular market, pare it down a bit, endow it with tasteful industrial design, make sure it has a strong, ideally "frustration-free" integrated environment to take part in, give it an upmarket but justifiable price, and market the heck out of it with aspirational brand advertising.
I feel like this is a rewriting of history. I knew literally a single person with a mac when the iPod came out, and they were not the first person I knew with an iPod.
My recollection of the time was that most MP3 players were based on Flash storage rather than HDDs, so I could get about 10 songs onto mine.
Macs didn't really take off as a thing until long after iPods had been mainstream for a while, so I don't think the integration was actually very important compared to the fact that there was a well known HDD-based MP3 player.
There were certainly HDD-Mp3 players around before the iPod (I used to own a Creative Nomad Jukebox and then the excellent Archos Jukebox which even allowed you to flash open source firmware on it).
I think the first Windows compatible iPod was the game changer. It had a large HDD but was much lighter and smaller than similar HDD-mp3 players at the time (such as the ones above).
Apple might streamline their offerings, simplify them dramatically, but they also aggressively update it. Where the Nomad came out and was incrementally improved the iPod got re-invented several times, often cannibalizing its own market share in the process.
Part fashion accessory, part music appliance, part computer, the purpose of the iPod was understood by Apple and poorly understood by their competitors.
Just like how the Walkman wasn't the first portable cassette player, or even technically the best, Sony relentlessly innovated on that form factor making smaller, lighter versions, waterproof ones, and ultimately owned that market. It wasn't until the iPod rolled around that someone displaced that position so completely.
you are correct. I was on my second HDD-Based mp3 player before the Ipod came around. I Also had the Nomad and replaced it with the Zen. Googling I see dozens of models, but I believe it was the Zen Xtra. I still have it in a box of old electronics.
I recall it being very difficult to explain to my peers what I was carrying. Thankfully the nomad looked like a CD player.
The fact that you knew only one person with a Mac when the iPod came out really makes you rather unsuited to speak about what went on with the iPod in the greater Mac community at a time when the iPod was exclusive to Macs. You are falling prey to the availability heuristic[1].
Certainly, my point was that the Mac community was not particularly relevant to the success of the iPod, due to its small size, and the growth of the iPod far outpaced the growth of Mac computers.
Enabling that supra-Mac growth of iPod sales was precisely the reason why starting with the iPod 3G Apple shifted from FireWire to USB and began supporting filesystems beyond HFS+.
(Off topic, but not that much: my sister grabbed her first iPod as a windows user approximately 12 hours after the 3G became available on the shelves here in Italy, mainly because she had been so envious of mine... so anecdotally there was quite a lot of pent-up demand, and they were smart to bottle it up to the point of explosion and then harness it.)
Clearly there was pent up demand, my main argument is that "integration" wasn't the reason for the demand, as evidenced by the huge spike of iPod sales, rather than iPod + Mac sales.
I mean, I had a iPod, but I used 3rd party software to load it since iTunes was mess.
That’s a very harsh statement. I was the only person I knew with a Mac when I started using them in 2002 (coming from OpenStep on an x86 machine, so hardly the prototypical ‘switcher’). It's probably fairly typical that in the very late 1990s or very early 2000s some high proportion of switchers (particularly those working outside of certain lines of work such as DTP or video editing) found themselves in contexts where they themselves were the only person on the platform, these people are literally those that jump-started the gradual shift towards the Mac as a revived platform.
Your recollection matches mine. I got my first 2nd gen ipod when I was using windows and when it still came bundled with musicmatch (which was worse than any version of itunes). Ecosystem was not a consideration, storage space and ease of use were. The huge screen, clean UI and clickwheel were a major improvement over contemporary mp3 players.
That ipod still works. Every once in a while I charge it and listen to the gentle clicking of its tiny drive.
I got the iPod the day it came out in the UK (2001-11-22, London MacExpo, Islington), plugged it into my Mac, and in short order had all my iTunes music on it, including playlists (remember: iTunes was there before the iPod; Apple even had a "Rip, Mix, Burn" commercial [1]).
Sure, at that time, few people had a Mac, but certain demographics had it. And I distinctly recall that people in the office were curious about the iPod, and were impressed with the intuitive UI (with the physical scroll wheel, which was really quite nice - it had inertia and would spin a while when you spun fast).
FireWire, integration, and storage size ("all your music in your pocket") definitely played a role. Basically, if you had an iTunes library, the iPod was a total no-brainer.
It most certainly is a reimagining of history, everyone was using Winamp to play their mp3s when the iPod first came out in 2001. Winamp was the best, nothing came close to beating it. AOL paid $80 million for Winamp.
Meanwhile Apple had the monstrosity that was/is QuickTime.
The reason iPod was so popular was it's form factor/UI/UX/ease of use and the iTunes Music Store.
It also needed USB to become successful, FireWire held the iPod back from mainstream adoption.
Winamp 2 was the music player of choice of discretionary users who knew to seek out software on their own. Winamp 3 came out and it was so colossally awful that most people stayed on 2.
If you bought your computer in a store -- like most people in the US at the time -- instead of building your own, it came bundled with some other product: WMP at least, possibly MusicMatch, RealJukebox (eventually merged back into RealPlayer), which you were likely using. Getting your Nomad or iRiver, a comparable devices to the iPod, to work with that, was not as smooth as the iTunes-iPod combo.
Getting your device to work was just a matter of plugging them in and copying the files to the mass storage drive that appeared afterwards. From the most popular options, it was only the iPod that needed some special handling with special software to write to its proprietary database in order to listen to new files on your device.
> Meanwhile Apple had the monstrosity that was/is QuickTime.
Nope, Apple had had iTunes since 2001, and by the time the iPod came out, I for one had ripped most of my CDs to iTunes and basically used the Mac as the primary music machine.
I vaguely remember that when my sister installed iTunes on her Windows XP machine, she also found herself lumbered with QuickTime... whether that was a sly bundling move by Apple or an actual dependency I cannot recall (or perhaps never really knew), but what does stick with me is how much regular grief it caused her.
Actual dependency. Mac or Windows, QuickTime was the mechanism by which iTunes performed any playback at all whether audio or video. Anything that ran in QuickTime could theoretically also run in iTunes though if I recall correctly though, iTunes would still limit the file-types you could import into your library.
Even today, iTunes still depends on QuickTime, but given I haven't used Windows in almost ten years or seriously used iTunes in almost 8 years, I couldn't tell you whether that dependency is the old QuickTime 7 API or if Apple ported a subset of the newer QuickTime APIs over I also couldn't really tell you which they use on Macs* anymore either given I prefer to avoid launching iTunes whenever possible.
That said, iTunes up to about version 6 point whatever the last point update was, was genuinely a really great jukebox on Windows. It was easy to use, loaded fast, ran fast and I ran it nearly 24/7 on my old XP machine. iTunes 7 ruined all of that, and my first indication would have been when it took over an hour to complete the install process and the first run was dog slow.
* Apple did deprecate and remove QuickTime 7 from Mac OS X, that said, I wouldn't put it past them to maintain an API in maintenance mode exclusively for their own use, particularly when it comes to maintaining the many-heads of the beast that is iTunes.
XP shipped with WMP 8, but WMP 9 was the landmark release that brought more ripping options, star ratings, a quick navigation screen, and essentially made WMP into the product that is familiar to many from the XP era.
Except literally (almost) nobody used windows media player to listen to mp3s. Certainly nobody I knew and the majority of my friends are not "techies." Whatever windows media player was doing is not really relevant.
In 2000, the streaming media player market had RealNetworks in first place [1] with 12% market share, Apple with QuickTime in second at 7%, WMP in distant third at 3%. By 2004, QuickTime had over 36% share, WMP in the lead at 38%, RealPlayer just shy of 25% [2]. WebSiteOptimization.com's January 2008 report [3] about streaming media players uses data sourced from Nielsen for the years 2003-2008 that shows the steady rise of iTunes, the flat trends for QuickTime and RealPlayer, and the more modest growth but higher absolute numbers for Windows Media Player.
Clearly, the install base of these products significantly contributed to the software people used to manage their portable music players. In May 2003, a Nielsen report put Winamp's install base at 5.5 million, Windows Media Player at 43.1 million, RealNetworks at 26 million, and QuickTime at 13.5 million [4][5].
I wouldn’t put too much stock in those figures, especially Nielsen. I was in the streaming industry at the time, built the world’s largest Windows Media streaming network. I agree with other comments here, people largely didn’t manage media libraries using WMP.
XP and WMP might pre-date the iPod but they were useless in terms of media management and music syncing. For one, WMP default to the .wma format for audio which didn't work on any portable player at the time. You could switch it to use MP3's but you had to install an MP3 codec in order to get that to work and most users had no inclination to do anything of the sort.
I think the OP's point was that, while you could do this stuff on Windows, it wasn't nearly as functional, seamless, or simple as it was with an iPod and iTunes or even MusicMatch (which really, really sucked, at the time).
> A lucky set of circumstances led to the iPod dominating the digital audio player market: bold marketing, a smaller HDD form factor, high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs.
Which of these four things are lucky circumstances and not the product of smart, consumer-thoughtful, hard work on the part of various teams at Apple?
Why is it that Apple has been "lucky" in this way so many times when so many other companies could have won instead?
> Apple had already stolen the higher end of the market
Stolen? I realize this is just a turn of phrase, but I think it does reveal a strong bias that sees a market win by Apple as illegitimate.
I'm not disagreeing with you but the small 1.8" HDD was kind of a stroke of luck. Rubinstein stumbled upon it visiting Toshiba, who didn't even know what they could use it for, but without it, there wouldn't be an iPod as we know it.
Before I bought my first iPod I got a Sony Network Walkman NW-E3. It was about the size of a packet of gum, had 64MB of flash memory, and was so unrelentingly awful that I swore I would never buy another piece of Sony hardware. I don't remember ever feeling so furious about any other purchase I've made.
That the iPod dominated the industry really shouldn't be a surprise when Sony was producing junk like the NW-E3.
> A lucky set of circumstances led to the iPod dominating the digital audio player market: bold marketing, a smaller HDD form factor, high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs... Apple bundled MusicMatch Jukebox at first, but then made iTunes available on Windows
That's a heck of a lot of "lucky circumstances" to call it "lucky circumstances" ;)
I'd say it was a lot of hard work delivering on a (rather novel at the time) idea that may or may not have worked. All that effort paid off in the end. Same goes for iPhone.
> high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs.
These two, at least, aren't it. The iPod only became truly successful once it had a USB connection and a Windows client. Before that point it was a total niche product.
> A lucky set of circumstances led to the iPod dominating the digital audio player market: bold marketing, a smaller HDD form factor, high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs.
The best thing about the iPod was its usability (the scrolling wheel). Mac integration is pretty irrelevant since almost everyone had a PC back in those days.
I had an iRiver H340 [1] back in those days (~2004 or so). It had decent hardware keys for control, and a whopping 40 GB of space (with a 2.5" HDD). iPods back then had a fraction of that. The iRiver h3x0 could play both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. The battery would last long enough for commuting back & forth. But it didn't have such a scrolling wheel. Nor did it have any of the DRM garbage. Nor did it receive any of the marketing or hype the iPod had. You could however just download a bunch of MP3 from a.b.mp3.* or whatever and fill your device up. Back in those days, it was even legal to "download" in my country. Or you could use EAC to rip a bunch of your CDs and have it with you on the go in a more portable... "format". Oh, and it had USB OTG. You could also pimp it with unofficial open source firmware, Rockbox [2]
Quoting Cnet's review from 2005: "It's just not as out-of-the-box simple as the iPod. If this all sounds discouraging, just remember: the H340 does so much more than the iPod." and "It's noticeably thick, not to mention heavier than it looks. (In the world of gadgets, a few ounces or fractions of inches make a difference.) The overall look is utilitarian although the color screen does add some style points. We like to call the H340 the "Soviet iPod."" [3]
A lucky set of circumstances led to the iPod dominating the digital audio player market: bold marketing, a smaller HDD form factor, high-speed FireWire connection, and a great integration story on Macs.
It seems dead as well. No new iPad Mini since 2015, with an outdated hardware equivalent to a iPhone 6 (2014). iOS11 artificially slows down iPad Mini 4 and no new iPad Mini in sight.
I bought the iPad Mini 4 at Apple HQ shop, they gazed at me when I asked for an iPad Mini earlier this year. They only sell a 128GB model, no other model. Next time I will avoid impulsive shopping of Apple products.
By the time Microsoft caught up with WinXP and Windows Media Player
"Caught up"? The steaming pile that Microsoft call Windows Media Player is the sole reason I ever bought an iPod. Synching was barely worthy of the word, getting music on any of the "Plays for Sure" devices was a pain in the ass, random shit just didn't work (I recall making a playlist was damned near impossible), and to put the cherry on top, all of your Plays for Sure surely didn't play after they shut that store down. Please note for the record that I was a Kool-Aid guzzling Microsoft employee at the time. Any sane person would have given up on the first try.
So one day the wife and I headed to the local Apple Store and hooked ourselves up with a couple of Nanos. The lack of friction made long-term customers out of us.
It was all about the interface for me- and the fact that I could turn the volume up / down, and play / pause through the outside of my pants pocket. That was THE killer feature.
The main competitor for Apple’s iPods was Sony. And the reason why Apple won is the fact that Sony also includes Sony Music, i.e. insisted on DRM. I think that’s why minidiscs didn’t really took off.
I bought my first (of many) iPods immediately after it was announced. Watched the keynote and got it. I can't remember any other device getting more use in my life for several years. I still have the original 5GB iPod.
I think this is kind of unfortunate. I wish I could still get my hands on a huge iPod that just does music. Maybe anachronistic but for the car and other activities, I would have loved to have the massive iPods.
My classic ipod is 10+ years old, contains my entire music library (> 15000 songs/recordings) and continues to work on a daily basis. The battery seems to be operating fine and I've never encountered any disk errors. There is less than 10G available on the disk but I'm not acquiring content any more so that's acceptable. It's an example of a product that just worked. Maybe the UI could be a little tempermental at times but, ultimately, it did what it needed to do and what I asked of it. It will continue to accompany me until it goes cold and dead.
Does it have to be an iPod? Since back then countless digital, mobile audio players came to market - from expensive audiophile choices to affordable, yet worthwhile options. Sony and Fiio make decent, affordable audio players to name two examples.
> Here's a question: will the iPod have a retro comeback moment, as electro-mechanical media like vinyl records and even cassettes have had?
The iPod is a brand and not a product category. The analog, would be standalone digital portable media players having a retro-comeback, not then iPod itself having one.
> Or maybe once you cross into the digital divide, does the experience and associated nostalgia perhaps not work the same way?
Quite possible; is there any aspect of the experience with iPods or other standalone players that is lost using multifunction digital media devices like smartphones?
Battery life. That is, many hours of play time, and very little battery consumption when not playing. Great for multiple days of camping with no power.
Very light-weight and small. People going for a run would strap it to an arm or other convenient location.
iPods, however, were much more prevalent than other digital, portable media players. iPod Classic likely will have a comeback, as people are talking about it right now. There's was a lot of chatter when the movie Baby Driver was released, as the main character uses one, and the director talked a lot about his. Google "ipod classic nostalgia" or "ipod baby driver" to see a lot of articles.
> Quite possible; is there any aspect of the experience with iPods or other standalone players that is lost using multifunction digital media devices like smartphones?
Battery life. Having a device with a known, dedicated use (as a psychological difference, rather than a strictly practical one). Handling the most common operations by touch, rather than actually pulling it out to use a clumsy touchscreen.
Physical buttons. With my dedicated media device I can control it with the buttons and leave it in my pocket. When I play music on my phone I have to take it out and look at it to make sure I tap the right part of the screen.
Also a lower replacement price. Someone might want to steal my expensive smart phone, or it might break and make me sad. If I had a $20 dedicated media player, then there's nothing to worry about.
You can tap those physical buttons and the thought will never cross your mind to check the weather, and ooh since we're at it, how's things on facebook? Email? Oh boy! 10 minutes down the toilet because I wanted to change the song playing!
It's almost certain. I've fired mine up again for the first time in years because I want digital music in my bedroom, but don't want a phone in there any longer -- and the nostalgia is just as strong as it was when I got a new turntable.
Digital music is digital whether it's being streamed from physical hard disk or memory. It's not comparable to vinyl, which has a distinct sound and interface compared to other methods of listening.
Likely not. I have an old silver shuffle (the tiny USB pen size). Didn't use it much, tried to fire it back up and the battery is toast on it.
Most electronics will have toasted batteries over time. Devices without easily replaceable batteries will have a harder re-surgence, even if they deserve one.
Man, the iPod had a great interface for quickly browsing a hierarchy of organized music. I know that people hate organizing music into hierarchies. I know that search is faster than browsing (usually). I know that curation is hard generally.
But... I listed to a wider variety of music when I could start at an entry point and browse my way in, possibly tripping on a long un-listened album along the way. Now with most search driven music subscription apps, I feel like
1. Browsing functionality is crap. I typically can't go in looking for a genre and find anything I want to listen to.
2. The search feature is a brick wall of need-to-know-what-you-want-to-listen-to.
Also, having the TV on (routed digitally to a DAC / Amp) to listen to music sucks. Most of the streaming apps for TV scream for attention visually, when I want to—surprise—listen to music.
So yeah, a small interface that I can reliably browse music from like an iPod attached to my sound system but could also be taken with me sounds lovely.
I still use my click wheel ipod. The UI makes finding my songs much quicker than on my phone, and it can create on-the-go playlists just by holding down the button, which Apple still hasn't figured out how to do on their phones. And finally it has a high quality DAC so music sounds better than from my phone.
I've been thinking about replacing the hard drive and battery in mine for the past few years. The wheel-based iPods really did have the best UI for music in any device I've ever owned. If you're familiar with it, you can navigate with extraordinary ease.
Years ago, I replaced the 20GB drive in mine with a 30GB drive, because I was having issues. It was pretty easy with my 4th-gen iPod. Turns out that the issues were actually in the USB interface, not the drive itself. So I struggled to get the drive re-filled, and haven't changed the data on it in...probably 7 or 8 years.
Yes ! the clickwheel is too good, it has no competition in the UX dept be it with the Apple OS or the Custom aftermarket Firmware.
Still rocking a 5.5G iPod 30GB, Recently modded it with a 200GB MicroSD and it runs on the Rockbox which is Open Source and doesn't have any limit on the songs or storage that my other iPod Classc 6G 80GB has, thanks to Apple for that limit on the 6G iPod Classics, Rockbox can break that limit, But yeah you always need to boot to OF (Official Firmware) to copy tracks onto the iPod else there will be song skipping etc, Perhaps due to the third party HW chipset in between which is the SD Adapter (this is for every iPod 5G-7G with aftermarket modded HW)
And also yeah the 5.5G iPod (I think there are older iPods with this chip plus the iPhone 2G also had this/the same company's chip and 1st gen iPod Touch as well iirc) DAC chip is from Wolfson Audio which used to be great before the CL (Cirrus Logic) engulfed them & this makes it great fun to listen over my CL chip 6G, forget the phones, Apart from the Wolfson powered Voodoo modded Android phones nothing comes close to that level of detail, fun.
To people who want to mod them head over to the iFlash and get a hold of it, you'll be shocked to see how robust these things are. Plus there can be lot of inter mods that can be done like you can fit a 5.xG chipset into a 6-7G shell and vice versa - the frame can be interchanged+faceplate also goes in hand with the respective frame or need to shave a few bits off the metal frame, along with the backplate, headphone jack/hold switch flex cable plus massive battery upgrade(s) also exists - 2000mAh and up, these all are interchangeable. The Clickwheels, LCD panel aren't)
I think there would be still quite a market for an up-to date incarnation of the iPod. Roughly in the size of the last iPod nano. There are times and activities where you can or don't want to use your iPhone and traditionally use an iPod. Especially if it came with a bit more storage and of course good Apple Music integration (e.g. be able to automatically sync your playlists to your iPod).
The Apple Watch might one day take that role, but for now it doesn't offer enough storage and its interaction is a bit more difficult due to the small size.
Sure, there's plenty of markets that Apple exits that they could still make money on. But Apple has always been a company about focus. They just can't keep all those designers and engineers focused on a dying market segment. Better to refocus them on something new.
My iPhone SE is literally the best phone I’ve ever owned. Perfect size, used sparingly, and often as a tether for my iPad instead when I want to do any type of content management or creation. And it fits in my pocket properly!
Then I successfully went the entire lifespan of the iPod without ever owning one. There was a time I would have been proud of that, now I don't care enough to engage in Kool-Aid references.
I'm hugely disappointed that they discontinued the shuffle. It's the best music player for workouts period. No fussing with the bluetooth pairing, just plug in headphones, clip and go.
I personally use mine for swimming. You can buy waterproofed shuffles such as this one: http://a.co/f64p74y and they work extremely well for swimming. In fact when the shuffle was discontinued I immediately bought another one as backup to my trusty waterproof shuffle that I've used for 3 years.
It's a much more expensive solution, but as far as the "best" solution, I'll take a cellular equipped Apple Watch + AirPods and a subscription to Apple Music for most workouts.
For swimming, I guess you could use something like this.
don't regular headphones not work well in the water? I thought you absolutely needed bone conduction headphones for swimming with music to be a pleasant experience
The greatest innovation of the iPod was the bold move to make the earbuds white. This made the music player - usually tucked away in the pocket - a visible symbol of status and coolness. Together with a brilliant marketing campaign which made it into a must-have fashion item, and special content contracts, it made the iPod a huge success.
Technical aspects really aren't what made the iPod successful. Sure, the clickwheel was a really great idea, and it was an overall well-polished product. But other players were good too. Without the marketing, and without the breakthrough pricing of music on the iTunes Music Store (complete with iPod-ecosystem lockin via DRM), it would have gone nowhere.
In some ways the iPhone is a similar story IMO, but I guess that's even more controversial...
I understand the deprecation of the iPod classic [0] but i don't for the life of me know why Apple still hasen't increased the iPod touch storage space to 256gb.
Another perspective: I gave my 5 year old an old iPod Nano + some over-ear headphones, and she uses them to listen to music and kid podcasts. I much prefer this over an iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad. We're just not ready for her to have that kind of screen time.
I miss my iPod Mini. I had it running RockBox (a uclinux distribution aimed at MP3 players), and replaced the 1.8” HDD with a compact flash card (32GB, I think?). Got a decade of use out of it.
I kind of want to go see if it’s in my cupboard still.
I bought a black iPod Shuffle from a physical Apple Store the day they announced its discontinuation. It’s still in its box. I don’t know what it is about the demented functionality of the thing, but they’re adorable, dependable, and tough as rocks. I’ve got probably half a dozen iPods of various kinds in working condition strewn around the place, even though I don’t use them regularly (including an iPod Video with an aftermarket SSD and fresh battery, a first generation iPod Touch from 2007, an elongated iPod Shuffle with a mirror finish, and a few incarnations of iPod Nano). I’ve got a friend that has a strip of different coloured iPod Shuffles assembled on a nylon strap (in chromatic order, no less) all linked simultaneously to a audio jack muxer, so she can select an iPod shuffle based on her mood.
There’s a lot of nostalgia involved in these things. They’re not bad devices. They could have gone on selling them for almost forever.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadWired (I think) sometimes pulls out old stories and puts them on their homepage along with the news, poster might not realized.
Side note, I still have one of those iPod Shuffles around somewhere. Great little device to clip on your running shorts, but it had the weirdest cable. They mapped 4 USB pins onto a TRRS connector and synced it through the headphone jack.
The iTunes reliance was annoying in general, but it seemed even more out of placed with the "USB stick" shuffle.
[1]. Don't know if you could call them apps, as they needed to be rebuilt with the OS (don't remember if they were pluggable modules or you literally had to rebuild the OS if you wanted to write an App, but it came out of the box with a few apps and games, and you could write your own in C. Their API was weaker than Android's, but to me more enjoyable.)
Many people think that way, but I really much prefer to organise my music in iTunes than in the file system. (Even with iTunes, you can always go down to the file system if you want to, but try making a smart playlist in the file system alone...)
(Granted though that iTunes has become way too crowded with functionality now.)
iTunes + filesystem aren't the only two options. At the time, I usually had my library set up in Winamp and XMMS, and iTunes was annoyingly opinionated about what the structure of the library should be. I would've liked the option to use something besides iTunes.
*Do not eat iPod Shuffle
Ugh CNN does this too (along with changing the "updated time" and healines) to look like they have more content than they actually do. No doubt it's smart but really annoying when you realize you've clicked an article thats really old.
[1]: I'll qualify that I mean something with a screen and a user interface, because I once had a toaster oven that was pretty great
To be fair, I tend to stick with the same songs anyway, it makes it easy for me to always know how I'm doing with regards to my run, without having to look at the watch or wait for a mile / km update to come along, since I know when in the playlist I should be when reaching certain parts of my track. (Provided I run the same track, that is, but usually I do.)
The Windows world at the time was a big mess of nonstandard cabling, messy drivers, sketchy quasi-shareware applications vying for presence on your desktop, while the Apple world was plug-and-play over a high-speed bus that came standard, and the music management experience was top-notch. And while there was some good hardware coming out of Korea to give the iPod a run for its money, the integrated Apple experience was without match.
For Windows, Apple bundled MusicMatch Jukebox at first, but then made iTunes available on Windows, which became their foothold that would later set up the iPhone for success.
By the time Microsoft caught up with WinXP and Windows Media Player, Apple had already stolen the higher end of the market, leaving WMP largely in the domain of cheap flash-based USB sticks that could only fit a subset of your songs. Then everyone pivoted to a DRM-laden storefront, making switching costs high. A later effort to refocus their first-party efforts with Zune resulted in an incompatible DRM ecosystem, and fizzled on the market.
The iPod, in many ways, foreshadowed the Apple tactic that would become famous from the later iPhone: take the state-of-the-art in a particular market, pare it down a bit, endow it with tasteful industrial design, make sure it has a strong, ideally "frustration-free" integrated environment to take part in, give it an upmarket but justifiable price, and market the heck out of it with aspirational brand advertising.
My recollection of the time was that most MP3 players were based on Flash storage rather than HDDs, so I could get about 10 songs onto mine.
Macs didn't really take off as a thing until long after iPods had been mainstream for a while, so I don't think the integration was actually very important compared to the fact that there was a well known HDD-based MP3 player.
I think the first Windows compatible iPod was the game changer. It had a large HDD but was much lighter and smaller than similar HDD-mp3 players at the time (such as the ones above).
Part fashion accessory, part music appliance, part computer, the purpose of the iPod was understood by Apple and poorly understood by their competitors.
Just like how the Walkman wasn't the first portable cassette player, or even technically the best, Sony relentlessly innovated on that form factor making smaller, lighter versions, waterproof ones, and ultimately owned that market. It wasn't until the iPod rolled around that someone displaced that position so completely.
I recall it being very difficult to explain to my peers what I was carrying. Thankfully the nomad looked like a CD player.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic
(Off topic, but not that much: my sister grabbed her first iPod as a windows user approximately 12 hours after the 3G became available on the shelves here in Italy, mainly because she had been so envious of mine... so anecdotally there was quite a lot of pent-up demand, and they were smart to bottle it up to the point of explosion and then harness it.)
I mean, I had a iPod, but I used 3rd party software to load it since iTunes was mess.
That ipod still works. Every once in a while I charge it and listen to the gentle clicking of its tiny drive.
Sure, at that time, few people had a Mac, but certain demographics had it. And I distinctly recall that people in the office were curious about the iPod, and were impressed with the intuitive UI (with the physical scroll wheel, which was really quite nice - it had inertia and would spin a while when you spun fast).
FireWire, integration, and storage size ("all your music in your pocket") definitely played a role. Basically, if you had an iTunes library, the iPod was a total no-brainer.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ECN4ZE9-Mo
Windows XP pre-dates the iPod. Windows Media Player pre-dates the iPod by over ten years.
The whole post feels like you've re-imagined a lot of the history, certainly much of it doesn't align with my experiences and impressions at the time.
Meanwhile Apple had the monstrosity that was/is QuickTime.
The reason iPod was so popular was it's form factor/UI/UX/ease of use and the iTunes Music Store.
It also needed USB to become successful, FireWire held the iPod back from mainstream adoption.
If you bought your computer in a store -- like most people in the US at the time -- instead of building your own, it came bundled with some other product: WMP at least, possibly MusicMatch, RealJukebox (eventually merged back into RealPlayer), which you were likely using. Getting your Nomad or iRiver, a comparable devices to the iPod, to work with that, was not as smooth as the iTunes-iPod combo.
Nope, Apple had had iTunes since 2001, and by the time the iPod came out, I for one had ripped most of my CDs to iTunes and basically used the Mac as the primary music machine.
Even today, iTunes still depends on QuickTime, but given I haven't used Windows in almost ten years or seriously used iTunes in almost 8 years, I couldn't tell you whether that dependency is the old QuickTime 7 API or if Apple ported a subset of the newer QuickTime APIs over I also couldn't really tell you which they use on Macs* anymore either given I prefer to avoid launching iTunes whenever possible.
That said, iTunes up to about version 6 point whatever the last point update was, was genuinely a really great jukebox on Windows. It was easy to use, loaded fast, ran fast and I ran it nearly 24/7 on my old XP machine. iTunes 7 ruined all of that, and my first indication would have been when it took over an hour to complete the install process and the first run was dog slow.
* Apple did deprecate and remove QuickTime 7 from Mac OS X, that said, I wouldn't put it past them to maintain an API in maintenance mode exclusively for their own use, particularly when it comes to maintaining the many-heads of the beast that is iTunes.
Microsoft took about 5 years to catch up, no small part due to USB 2.0
Clearly, the install base of these products significantly contributed to the software people used to manage their portable music players. In May 2003, a Nielsen report put Winamp's install base at 5.5 million, Windows Media Player at 43.1 million, RealNetworks at 26 million, and QuickTime at 13.5 million [4][5].
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/10/business/technology-micros... [2] http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-product-marketing-says-qu... [3] http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0801/ [4] http://www.zdnet.com/article/music-players-market-share-wina... [5] https://www.cnet.com/news/aol-trumpets-new-winamp/
XP was released on 25th octobre 2001. First ipod 2 days before, on 23th october 2001.
I think the OP's point was that, while you could do this stuff on Windows, it wasn't nearly as functional, seamless, or simple as it was with an iPod and iTunes or even MusicMatch (which really, really sucked, at the time).
And the Creative Nomad ZEN Xtra with 60GB was phenomenal for a reasonably sized library.
For software, I recall two options:
MediaMonkey Gold, a media player that synced with ZEN players and could automatically convert media formats.
Notmad Explorer, a software suite from Red Chair Software that allowed for file and playlist management for the ZEN players.
Which of these four things are lucky circumstances and not the product of smart, consumer-thoughtful, hard work on the part of various teams at Apple?
Why is it that Apple has been "lucky" in this way so many times when so many other companies could have won instead?
> Apple had already stolen the higher end of the market
Stolen? I realize this is just a turn of phrase, but I think it does reveal a strong bias that sees a market win by Apple as illegitimate.
That the iPod dominated the industry really shouldn't be a surprise when Sony was producing junk like the NW-E3.
That's a heck of a lot of "lucky circumstances" to call it "lucky circumstances" ;)
I'd say it was a lot of hard work delivering on a (rather novel at the time) idea that may or may not have worked. All that effort paid off in the end. Same goes for iPhone.
These two, at least, aren't it. The iPod only became truly successful once it had a USB connection and a Windows client. Before that point it was a total niche product.
The best thing about the iPod was its usability (the scrolling wheel). Mac integration is pretty irrelevant since almost everyone had a PC back in those days.
I had an iRiver H340 [1] back in those days (~2004 or so). It had decent hardware keys for control, and a whopping 40 GB of space (with a 2.5" HDD). iPods back then had a fraction of that. The iRiver h3x0 could play both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. The battery would last long enough for commuting back & forth. But it didn't have such a scrolling wheel. Nor did it have any of the DRM garbage. Nor did it receive any of the marketing or hype the iPod had. You could however just download a bunch of MP3 from a.b.mp3.* or whatever and fill your device up. Back in those days, it was even legal to "download" in my country. Or you could use EAC to rip a bunch of your CDs and have it with you on the go in a more portable... "format". Oh, and it had USB OTG. You could also pimp it with unofficial open source firmware, Rockbox [2]
Quoting Cnet's review from 2005: "It's just not as out-of-the-box simple as the iPod. If this all sounds discouraging, just remember: the H340 does so much more than the iPod." and "It's noticeably thick, not to mention heavier than it looks. (In the world of gadgets, a few ounces or fractions of inches make a difference.) The overall look is utilitarian although the color screen does add some style points. We like to call the H340 the "Soviet iPod."" [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iriver_H300_series
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox
[3] https://www.cnet.com/products/iriver-h320-20gb/review/
How is great execution "luck"?
It seems dead as well. No new iPad Mini since 2015, with an outdated hardware equivalent to a iPhone 6 (2014). iOS11 artificially slows down iPad Mini 4 and no new iPad Mini in sight.
I bought the iPad Mini 4 at Apple HQ shop, they gazed at me when I asked for an iPad Mini earlier this year. They only sell a 128GB model, no other model. Next time I will avoid impulsive shopping of Apple products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_Mini_4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A8 ... iPhone 6 and Ipad Mini 4 have the same CPU
"Caught up"? The steaming pile that Microsoft call Windows Media Player is the sole reason I ever bought an iPod. Synching was barely worthy of the word, getting music on any of the "Plays for Sure" devices was a pain in the ass, random shit just didn't work (I recall making a playlist was damned near impossible), and to put the cherry on top, all of your Plays for Sure surely didn't play after they shut that store down. Please note for the record that I was a Kool-Aid guzzling Microsoft employee at the time. Any sane person would have given up on the first try.
So one day the wife and I headed to the local Apple Store and hooked ourselves up with a couple of Nanos. The lack of friction made long-term customers out of us.
The main competitor for Apple’s iPods was Sony. And the reason why Apple won is the fact that Sony also includes Sony Music, i.e. insisted on DRM. I think that’s why minidiscs didn’t really took off.
There's also the non Apple branded ones.
Or maybe once you cross into the digital divide, does the experience and associated nostalgia perhaps not work the same way?
The iPod is a brand and not a product category. The analog, would be standalone digital portable media players having a retro-comeback, not then iPod itself having one.
> Or maybe once you cross into the digital divide, does the experience and associated nostalgia perhaps not work the same way?
Quite possible; is there any aspect of the experience with iPods or other standalone players that is lost using multifunction digital media devices like smartphones?
Very light-weight and small. People going for a run would strap it to an arm or other convenient location.
Battery life. Having a device with a known, dedicated use (as a psychological difference, rather than a strictly practical one). Handling the most common operations by touch, rather than actually pulling it out to use a clumsy touchscreen.
Also a lower replacement price. Someone might want to steal my expensive smart phone, or it might break and make me sad. If I had a $20 dedicated media player, then there's nothing to worry about.
Most electronics will have toasted batteries over time. Devices without easily replaceable batteries will have a harder re-surgence, even if they deserve one.
But... I listed to a wider variety of music when I could start at an entry point and browse my way in, possibly tripping on a long un-listened album along the way. Now with most search driven music subscription apps, I feel like
1. Browsing functionality is crap. I typically can't go in looking for a genre and find anything I want to listen to.
2. The search feature is a brick wall of need-to-know-what-you-want-to-listen-to.
Also, having the TV on (routed digitally to a DAC / Amp) to listen to music sucks. Most of the streaming apps for TV scream for attention visually, when I want to—surprise—listen to music.
So yeah, a small interface that I can reliably browse music from like an iPod attached to my sound system but could also be taken with me sounds lovely.
When iPods were around everyone referred to any MP3 player as an iPod and most people still say iPad to refer to tablets.
Still rocking a 5.5G iPod 30GB, Recently modded it with a 200GB MicroSD and it runs on the Rockbox which is Open Source and doesn't have any limit on the songs or storage that my other iPod Classc 6G 80GB has, thanks to Apple for that limit on the 6G iPod Classics, Rockbox can break that limit, But yeah you always need to boot to OF (Official Firmware) to copy tracks onto the iPod else there will be song skipping etc, Perhaps due to the third party HW chipset in between which is the SD Adapter (this is for every iPod 5G-7G with aftermarket modded HW)
And also yeah the 5.5G iPod (I think there are older iPods with this chip plus the iPhone 2G also had this/the same company's chip and 1st gen iPod Touch as well iirc) DAC chip is from Wolfson Audio which used to be great before the CL (Cirrus Logic) engulfed them & this makes it great fun to listen over my CL chip 6G, forget the phones, Apart from the Wolfson powered Voodoo modded Android phones nothing comes close to that level of detail, fun.
To people who want to mod them head over to the iFlash and get a hold of it, you'll be shocked to see how robust these things are. Plus there can be lot of inter mods that can be done like you can fit a 5.xG chipset into a 6-7G shell and vice versa - the frame can be interchanged+faceplate also goes in hand with the respective frame or need to shave a few bits off the metal frame, along with the backplate, headphone jack/hold switch flex cable plus massive battery upgrade(s) also exists - 2000mAh and up, these all are interchangeable. The Clickwheels, LCD panel aren't)
The Apple Watch might one day take that role, but for now it doesn't offer enough storage and its interaction is a bit more difficult due to the small size.
On the other hand, my next phone will probably be the next generation 4 inch iPhone SE with the most storage I can get when Apple introduces it.
I'm really starting to like the idea of a small phone + an iPad over a slightly larger phone that really doesn't enhance usability for me.
I personally use mine for swimming. You can buy waterproofed shuffles such as this one: http://a.co/f64p74y and they work extremely well for swimming. In fact when the shuffle was discontinued I immediately bought another one as backup to my trusty waterproof shuffle that I've used for 3 years.
For swimming, I guess you could use something like this.
https://www.wareable.com/headphones/best-headphones-for-swim...
Technical aspects really aren't what made the iPod successful. Sure, the clickwheel was a really great idea, and it was an overall well-polished product. But other players were good too. Without the marketing, and without the breakthrough pricing of music on the iTunes Music Store (complete with iPod-ecosystem lockin via DRM), it would have gone nowhere.
In some ways the iPhone is a similar story IMO, but I guess that's even more controversial...
I kind of want to go see if it’s in my cupboard still.
There’s a lot of nostalgia involved in these things. They’re not bad devices. They could have gone on selling them for almost forever.