It was fucking huge and was USB 1.1 so it took forever to load music on it. The originals iPod was much smaller (using a microdrive) and only supported FireWire. It could load music as fast as the drive could write.
And that is unrelated to the point that the iPod was a clone of existing tech. You might have liked it more, but that doesn't change the arrow of time.
The iPod as a clone of existing technology is uncharitable to the point of being foolish about it. Like so many successful products implementation is more important than a bill of materials.
The click wheel UI of the iPod made its large storage actually useful rather than just being a bullet point on a box. If you had a thousand songs loaded on your iPod it was pretty easy to navigate to any album, artist, or playlist.
Most other PMPs (even after the iPod) had UIs that were basically lifted from the Walkman. Navigating HDD players was a pain in the ass.
Besides the click wheel UX the iPod had iTunes doing the heavy lifting of library management. It made editing and adding metadata to songs, which helped organize your library, very easy. That same organization completely carried over to the iPod. iTunes also supported automatically syncing an attached iPod so if you ripped a CD it appeared on your iPod after plugging it in.
Most of the competing HDD based PMPs were obsessed with just acting as mass storage devices when attached to a computer. So they had painful on-device UIs dealing with the multitude of differing naming conventions and poorly tagged files.
So while HDD players weren't invented by Apple they:
1. Made an HDD player small enough to fit in a pocket competing in dimensions with Flash based players.
2. Made a UI that allowed easy navigation of a large library.
3. Used a high speed connection that made it trivial to fill the large storage. This same connection also charged the device.
4. Had a very responsive UI not limited to the seek speed of the internal HDD. The iPod let iTunes do the hard work of creating the on device database. The iPod OS didn't need to go read metadata from every file to populate menus or display song information. It did the hard work once (in iTunes) and just used the database for everything but audio data from then on.
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.
You could take it apart though which was nice. When mine was on it's last legs, hard-drive clicking to death, I swapped in a cheap 250gb laptop drive and could finally carry all of my music library around instead of having to pick and choose.
Upgraded to a Zune after the battery on my Zen died. The screen and UI were great imo, sad it didn't stick around.
