this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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This is a very ignorant take. MP3 players before the iPod sucked for most people. Obtaining music that was properly tagged or ripping CDs with command-line apps was out of reach for the majority of people.
Saying that the iPhone wasn’t special is also crazy. The best-selling smartphone of all time wasn’t special?
Unbelievable…
At the time of release it it wasn’t. Palm was better. Blackberry had advantages in data speed and email. The iPhone couldn’t take advantage of its browser because of how slow mobile internet was.
The iPod at release was up against a number of players that were nearly identical.
Apple marketed its products better than everyone else, and by 2008 had definitely come up with winning products, but to say its stuff was unique or better at release is revisionist history.
Nonsense. Palm was not better. I sold Palm, Treo, and Blackberry phones at the time and the sudden drop in confidence was palpable. Your second statement is completely wrong too. The entire difference between the iPhone was that it didn’t use mobile web. Safari was a desktop-class browser, unlike the others (minus Flash, obviously). Even Windows devices like PocketPCs didn’t have full browsers.
Again, the iPod statement is just flat-out false. The alternatives at the time were Walkman devices, Creative Labs devices, and devices from Diamond, and crap like the RCA Kazoo. All of them had tiny LCD displays, 256MB of memory max, and transferred music like glorified flash drives. Tags had to be managed manually. Playlists weren’t a thing unless you created them in separate software. There was nothing “identical” about them.
Steve Jobs pulling out a 5GB iPod from his pocket broke the industry and started the whole market, changing the field from a niche for nerds into music for everyone. On top of that, it started the podcast revolution and that is undeniable. To say that it wasn’t unique or better is revisionist history.
You don’t remember how slow the iPhone browsing experience was when it came out? Speeds were capped at 128knps. Or how bad AT&T was in providing bandwidth? Granted other phones besides blackberry had bandwidth issues too, but 2007-2008 was effectively not usable without wifi. It wasn’t until iPhones could work on Verizon’s network that mobile iPhone browsers were usable.
Large capacity mp3 players existed when the iPod came out. Comparing the iPod to the cheap, low-capacity ones is disingenuous.
Granted, the market needed a kick in the ass and Apple did do that, but it’s not like they were the only ones doing it.