

Apple's New Thing (iPod) - Oct. 2001 - syl
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=500

======
mustpax
"I have a cd walkman and a burner already, and besides that now that I don't
have a dotcom job anymore I need that $400 to pay car payments and rent."

This forum post practically dates itself.

~~~
noonespecial
I cut and this quote just to paste it here. Beat me too it by many hours!

It does more than date the post. Its the most perfect example I've found of
how Apple sneaks up on markets and changes things. Is there anyone left who
might think that a cd walkman and a burner are somehow equivalent to an iPod?
Nobody called him out though. In 2001, it seemed reasonable.

I can't help but compare this to the "why do I want an iPad? I've already got
a laptop and a smartphone" crowd. I was underwhelmed by the iPad as well. I
found myself saying "all this hype for _this_!?" I probably won't be buying
one.

Its going to change the way humans use computers forever.

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daveinla
The iPod was not revolutionary, iTunes was. Everything posted about the first
iPod was spot on. The iPod didn't become a revolution until a) iTunes was
released for the Windows environment and b) it had a USB dock. Before those
two events, the iPod was a marginal product.

~~~
btucker
i agree those were the inflection points, but the iPod was completely
revolutionary from an interface perspective. The click wheel, the large
screen, the easy to navigate UI; these were things which hadn't made it to a
portable media player device before. Or if they had, they were never marketed
the way Apple was able to market the iPod from day one.

~~~
boredguy8
The click wheel didn't exist in 2001. And the screen was not particularly
large, either (the Neo Jukebox, for instance, if I remember correctly, had a
similar sized screen). The iPod Mini introduced the Click Wheel, and debuted
on the iPod proper on the 4g (both in 2004). And the connectors were horrible
early on: all firewire. Windows was supported through MusicMatch (eww) on the
2g and 3g, and it was after the 3g release that iTunes came to windows.

And it was when iTunes came to Windows that the iPod took off in sales
(ironically, reversing a LONG trend by Jobs to keep Apple products on the
Apple platform). In 2002 and 2003 they sold less than a million units. The
first quarter they had iTunes on windows, they moved over 2 million units--
more than double what they'd sold the previous holiday quarter.

People look at the iPod as this huge instant hit. It wasn't even 'till Q4 2004
that Apple sold more than 1m units in a quarter. And sales in 2005 came in a
large part from selling through Wal-Mart, too.

~~~
Kevin_Marks
The first iPod had the wheel, but it physically rotated. It did have the piezo
clicker too though.

~~~
boredguy8
The physically rotating wheel was surrounded by another wheel of buttons. the
Click Wheel didn't appear until the mini. 1st gen: mechanical wheel with a
surrounding wheel of buttons. 2nd gen: touch wheel surrounded by buttons. 3rd
gen: all touch with a row of buttons under the screen.

<http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1353> identifies the iPod (Click Wheel) as
their 2004 model.

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melvinram
My favorite comment on there:

"I still can't believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! Who
cares about an MP3 player? I want something new! I want them to think
differently! Why oh why would they do this?! It's so wrong! It's so stupid!"

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

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marciovm123
"...or are you really aiming to become a glorified consumer gimmicks firm?"

priceless

~~~
AndrewO
I love how that guy was so incensed that they'd devoted so much to iPods
instead of making better servers. Just imagine a world with no iPods, but
beefier Xserves... Oh, and Apple going out of business before 2005.

~~~
janm
Wasn't that Sun?

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ugh
Damn, digging for iPod articles from 2001 is fun! (For those who want to join
the fun, October 23 is the exact date.)

“Apple’s Musical Rendition: A Jukebox Fed by the Mac”, New York Times (David
Pogue, no less): [http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/25/technology/state-of-the-
ar...](http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/25/technology/state-of-the-art-apple-s-
musical-rendition-a-jukebox-fed-by-the-mac.html?scp=3&sq=ipod&st=nyt)

“Apple doesn’t change the world (yet)”, Der Spiegel (sorry, German):
<http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/tech/0,1518,164056,00.html>

“Apple enters the hi-fi market”, heise (sorry, German):
[http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Apple-entert-den-
HiFi...](http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Apple-entert-den-HiFi-Markt-
Update-47282.html)

What a strange world in 2001, though: no Gizmodo, no Engadget :)

~~~
wooby
Here's another throwback:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20011024015856/www.apple.com/ipod...](http://web.archive.org/web/20011024015856/www.apple.com/ipod/)

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padmanabhan01
I think this is the best comment there.

"I really wanted to like it. Really. But do the math: 20GB hard drive: $199
from APS tech. MP3 player: $50 from Best Buy. You save $150 plus get an extra
15 Gig of storage! "

------
garyrichardson
Sweet:

"All that hype for an MP3 player? Break-thru digital device? The Reality
Distiortion Field™ is starting to warp Steve's mind if he thinks for one
second that this thing is gonna take off."

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jasonlbaptiste
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

~~~
tdm911
link:
[http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257...](http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257&tid=107)

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code_duck
Slashdot panned the iPod back in 2001, too -
[http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257...](http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257&tid=107)

"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. "

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noelchurchill
Yeah, there were ipod haters, iphone haters, hater haters...

~~~
gbookman
Guess I was a hater hater. Bought the first iPod as soon as it came out. The
white headphones got me a lot of weird looks walking the halls at my high
school. It was a fantastic, well-made device.

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lr
The comments, of course, are priceless. Thanks!

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Tichy
And I still don't understand what anybody would need an iPod for (MP3 Player I
mean). Unless you are a commuter with > 45 min time per direction. I like
music, but I have decided that it's silly to shut out the world while being
outside.

Have iPods really changed the world, or have they just sold well?

~~~
philwelch
The point of having an iPod with that much storage isn't so you can listen to
more than one CD on your commute, it's so you can leave for your commute and
THEN choose which 20-40 minutes of music to listen to.

When I had a discman and I wanted to listen to music, guess what I had to
choose from? One burned CD if I was lucky, and _Mutter_ by Rammstein if I was
slightly less lucky. When I have an iPod or iPhone and I want to listen to
music, I can choose any song I own.

~~~
Tichy
Ah I see the 45 minutes was misleading. I didn't mean it because otherwise you
could just use a mobile CD player (are these still being made?). Just in
general I wouldn't see a point in having a MP3 player, unless I went the same
extremely boring route every day for long stretches of time (and not by
bicycle).

I suppose the majority of people are commuters, so maybe commuting alone is
sufficient to explains the high market penetration of iPods.

~~~
sofal
Everybody uses them in the gym as well. Working out is actually pretty boring.

~~~
Tichy
That's why I prefer running (beautiful scenery) and Yoga (beautiful women) :-)

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benwr
I wonder what the guy who asserts that "awsome" technology won't exist for
6000 years now thinks of the iPad.

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scblock
I needed this bit of nostalgia humor. Thanks for the link.

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Eliezer
It's sad that things have changed so little in 10 years.

~~~
rinich
I know. When will Apple stop releasing products for which there is no possible
market?

I mean I know I'm an Apple fanboy and all but I think they could have learned
from their failures

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zhyder
I'm tired of the comparison to the iPod or the iPhone. The iPhone had tons of
innovations on day 1. The iPod had some innovations to begin with (your music
library in your pocket), but other key ones -like the click wheel and the
iTunes store- came later. The iPad doesn't really have anything innovative in
it today.

Yes Apple may add more innovations later, and it may succeed even without them
(coz of iPhone users moving up, Apple's brand & marketing, etc.) but the
'Apple will succeed because the iPod+iPhone did' argument is getting old.

I absolutely believe in a simpler less-general-purpose device for casual home
computing, and a lightweight tablet seems like one of the top contenders for
the form factor, but the iPad itself is a pretty weak product.

~~~
squidbot
Do you not note the irony of reading the posts on the link and then writing
this?

