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A Brief History of the iPod
antdude writes "MacSlash mentioned MLAgazine's article on a brief history of the iPod. It all started on October 23, 2001 with the release of one of the most important products from Apple in its history."
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I find it interesting that every "iPod killer" attempts to add more features and make it cheaper. Unfortunately this has the side effect of it having a horrible design or uses cheap materials which makes it feel horrible to handle.
Personally I believe that if something looks and feels good, then people will buy it. As soon as a company accepts that there are people who are perfectly happy to pay more for something that looks and feels good, then they might spend a little more on the hardware and less on trying to get it's sales price as low as possible.
I fear that at the moment the only real competitor to Apple was Sony, but then they dropped the ball with a limited hard drive (no 40 gig option?) and the stupid requirement to convert to ATRAC. Creative have never produced a product that remotely looks like it's worth the money that was paid for it and iRiver (whilst being technically very good) needs to seriously review some of their design choices (ruggidised black and a stubbly joypad doesn't appeal to many and definately not to women).
Of course, everyones opinion is different. I know people who think the Creative one is beautiful and the Apple one horrible. But the market has clearly shown that they are in the minority.
More style, more class, less about the price point and someone could actually make it vaiguley close to having an "iPod killer" on their hands.
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"It all started on October 23, 2001 with the release of one of the most important products from Apple in its history."
Uh, no. It started when Tony Fadell had the idea of creating a digital music player and tying it to an online music store a few years before the iPod came out. Inside Look at Birth of the iPod on Wired News covers the stuff that happened before the iPod came out.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
iPod is not based on a new concept. Companies before Apple released hard drive based music players, but none had the charm and elegance in the Apple implementation. Unlike the competitors, the iPod used a high speed FireWire interface to transfer files on and off of it, and it used a tiny hard drive, that made the device a quarter of the size of comparable products. Besides the specifications, the iPod offered an intuitive interface and a beautiful enclosure. Even the ear buds were different and unique. Almost all audio equipment was black, but Apple created a set of ear buds that were glistening white. Everything in the design was there to make the user experience a better one.
The iPod was almost not released by Apple. The products creator, Tony Fadell, had shopped the idea to Phillips and RealNetworks before proposing the idea to Apple. Fadell found a welcoming enviroment at Apple, who agreed almost immediately to produce and market the device.
The iPod was so small that it can slip into a shirt pocket with ease, and with a Sony battery that lasts for ten hours on a charge. On the inside, the device had a tiny 1.8 in. Toshiba hard drive, weighing around fifty grams, far smaller than even notebook hard drives. Apple did not develop the operating system or MP3 player software. The operating system is from Pixio, a company staffed by many former Apple employees, and an MP3 player from PortalPlayer. Pixio's operating system has been implemented in many portable telephones allows for fast develpment on limitted deviced, taking up 155 kb. Since the original iPod, Pixio was acquired by Sun, who is happy to be selling its software on every iPod produced.
There was only one serious flaw with the iPod, and that was the price, The machine cost $400, making far from accessible to many consumers. Some lamented the lack of PC support, though Jobs promised a PC version very soon after the lauch. In fact, weeks after the lauch, third party utilities cropped up that enable iPod users to sync with their PC.
Several limitations were present in the first version. There was no remote control,despite a connector designed for such a puropse, there are no games, except for the breakout game included as an easter egg, the dial was subject to problems, and the software implemented limitting anti-piracy policies.
One month after the domestic launch of the iPod, it was launched in Europe, accompanied by new peripherals. Several companies were selling charging adapters, FM broadcasters and a plethora of cases. By the end of 2001, Apple had already sold 125,000 new iPods.
Like all Apple products, a major update was released several months later. In March of 2002, a 10 GB version of the iPod was released. Along with the new iPod, came a software update that included several bug fixes, and a new equalizer....
Hardly four months later, in July, a new 20 GB version was released, with a major price cut for the 5 and 10 GB versions. The new iPods are also PC compatible, using MusicMatch to sync with the player. A new calendar and artists search was included into the software that shipped on the new players. Unlike the earlier versions, the new iPods came with a remote control attached to the ear buds, which Apple soon released to existing iPod users as an add on. The most obvious physical change in the iPod comes in the scroll wheel. No longer is it a physical wheel, instead it is a touch sensitive wheel similar in function to a touchpad.
To many's surprise, Apple abruptly discontinued the
Apple was not the first to make a hard disk portable player. They were the first to ship one with a 1.8" hard disk, which hardly makes everything else a clone - they just got there second. Nobody was really taken by surprise, and the major MP3 companies were already well into designing their own.
Apple was also not the first to make a mini hard disk portable. They were the first to ship a 4GB 1" hard disk player, and then only just. They were beaten by many companies to ship a 1" 1.5GB HD player (including where I work) - but they had a supply of 4GB drives before everyone else. In fact, Rio even managed to announce and demonstrate their own 4GB player hours before Job's keynote speech. Spot how he deliberately missed the comparison of the Mini iPod to the Rio Nitrus (a 1" HD player), and instead picked a Rio 256MB flash player as a convenient strawman.
It's slightly irritating that Apple's reality distortion field now makes it possible for everyone to claim that all other players are "clones".
OS/2 just needed a sound card to do voice commands where the AV macs had a bunch of special DSP hardware
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
I got my 20% off my 12" Powerbook, which meant I could throw in an iPod too. Apple know how to look after their customers. I don't think I'll be turning back to x86 laptops for a long time.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
(It also plays WMA, but I don't know if it does it gaplessly as I don't have any WMAs...)
Winamp plays all these formats just fine, of course.
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
And don't forget that Apple's machines are almost dead silent. The fans on my inspiron could have matched wits with a 747. I was sitting in class the other day with my iBook and the room was so silent I was afraid that the clicking of a hard drive or the hum of a fan might disturb someone, but there was not a sound from my beloved (geek metaphor). The hardware is just better.
and the TFA is a POS.
And yes, OS/2 w3 (or 4? still can't recall) predates the release of sys 7.3 - I recall, because I installed OS/2 and played w/ the speech recog while waiting for 7.3 to be released.
Spoon boy: Do not try and bend the facts. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Spoon boy: There is no System 7.3.
Neo: There is no System 7.3?
Spoon boy: Then you'll see, that it is not the fact that bends, it is only your memory.
System 7 goes from 7.1.2 to 7.5, skipping 7.2, 7.3, 7.4 version numbers.
AVI. Was making avi files on macs before quicktime had even been thought of.
The early AVI was not a container. It's a file format used by Intel Indeo codec to store data. QuickTime was always a container and always has APIs associated with it. You can even use Indeo (on 68K Macs) codecs as a plugin to compress a video and output that as a QuickTime file. It became a container only in the last few years. Now you can use codecs such as 3IVX or DIVX along with MP3 to compress a movie to AVI. Unfortunately, Microsoft is putting their weight behind WMV as a container along with the DRM.
Just FYI...
:-P ). In 1993, PlainTalk, a much improved technology, debuted as a standard component in System 7.1.0 on Quadra 660AVs and 840AVs. Thereafter, command-oriented speech-recognition was a standard part of the Mac OS.
Apple's first foray into speech input was a technology demo in 1990 on the Mac IIsi, running System 6.0.7. It was extremely rudimentary. Things improved slightly in 1991 (in System 7.0), but the implemementation was still crude and a bit of work was needed to make it function properly (-- well, I never got it to function properly, anyway
D.
Anyone have any links to articles that might have a more broad history of the MP3 player in general?
Try this:
http://www.rockbox.org/playerhistory/
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