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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"?
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
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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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