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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 also talked with a Mac-enthusiatic buddy of mine, and he hated it. I don't know why, but he thought it would bring down Apple another notch on the finance scale. Guess he was wrong. Along with some that said "no wireless. Lame."
I find it the most indispensable tool in my life. Backup, file transport, music and calendar. With a huge harddrive.
... sometimes I fly with the white swan to my Liffey home.
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Since its inception, Apple has always been willing to gamble more with new products than most other companies
Granted, they flopped with the Newton... but they came out with the mac, the powerbook, peer2peer file sharing out of the box, the trackpad, the powerbook duo, speech recognition integrated on the OS on the 90's, quicktime, and the list goes on... (I would like to give them the mouse and the interface, but as with everything they also have a dark side)
It is good to see they are ripping the benefits of believing in something completely new... ( As they believed in a portable media player by some bogus guy who was rejected by other companies)
Kudos to Apple
Guaranteed: At least a dozen times prior to Apple releasing the iPod, large technology company middle managers refused to approve designs for competing devices, claiming with absolute certainty that no market existed for portable digital music players.
As those ass-molded-to-chair managers know, it's always easier to be a skeptic. The numbers of jobs and revenue lost to those WRONG decisions must be staggering.
Here's a brief history of the iPod:
First, Apple designed the iPod. One day an engineer came in succinctly blitzed and designed the horrible "I-ain't-seen-this-shit-since-Intellivision" circle navigation wheel thingy. The hippie fruits at Apple all applauded.
Then they bought usage rights to some second-rate cheap ass songs that never got played on the radio anyway, and used them to promote the thing. Said no-name bands became more famous because of the constant never-ending barrage of commercials. "Honey, if I do say so myself, this Black Eyed Peas song is rather good! I absolutely hated it the first 48,000 times I heard it but now it's starting to grow on me!"
Then Apple deployed their proven strategy of making the device look better than it actually performs, thereby luring thoughtless dimwits and college freshmen with enormous piles of high interest credit cards that they somehow "needed" one for Christmas.
Then when people realized that the music they were downloading for free was somehow supporting terrorism, and they were probably going to be castrated in town square, they needed another method to fill up the bottomless hole that is the iPod (seriously, who the hell needs to have that many gigs of mp3s with them at all times?). But wait, Apple was here with a solution! You can download the songs for a low low price, and it's legal! Oh...and the artists still get fucked! Yay! The RIAA can rest easy. iTunes is here.
And a legend was born.
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori
I know this is off topic, but I see they call the iPod one of the most important products in Apple history. How does one value their individual products, and how would a list of importantness lokk like? Like this?
1. Apple I for starting the whole thing?
2. Apple II for making Apple a business?
3. Macintosh for paving the way to the future?
4. iMac for saving the company?
5. iPod for attracting buyers outside of the crowd of believers?
Can Steve Jobs be called a "product" these days, and thus earn a place on the top 5?
didn't see any Rios or Dell laptops, though--go figure;>
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"?
A x86 computer that runs OS X natively? Sign me up.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Slashdot has never been revolutionary. It's never really on the cutting edge of anything. Most of the editor's comments end up being incendiary or show that they are profoundly out of touch with reality.
I think, therefore I am an Atheist.
Maybe they don't lose money, but the iPod is certainly a bigger cashcow, so why not pour R&D into that instead?
interesting how many ipod-clones are coming out
Sorry, it not imitation but, form being dictated by function. All hard drive based portable music players use similar hard drives.
When other companies paint theirs white and put U2 in their commercials, then its imitation.
Yes, I know. I'm splitting hairs.
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
If you were just talking desktops, I kinda agree. Laptops on the other hand, I feel there are simply no x86 based laptops that can compete with the powerbook line on price, performance, features, etc. I have noticed the powerbooks line (and to a much lesser extent, the ibook line) making a massive comeback in higher education.
Whereas I would used to go to various conferences and see over 90% thinkpads and some dells, now is seems well over half the people attending have powerbooks, and that number just keeps growing.
Granted higher ed is a small subset of the population, but I have been noticing more apple laptops in other groups as well.
Finkployd
Precisely how mad is "barking mad?" Is that the point at which you express your displeasure by standing in front of stores that sell Ipods and unleashing your canine fury?
iPod and iPod photo: 1.8 inch hard disks
iPod mini: 1.0 inch hard disks
Notebooks: 2.5 inch hard disks
Thought you were right on? Think again.
And no easy way to have an encrypted home directory, or make encrypted disk images (oh I know how to do it with a loopback file system, but most people don't)
:)
And much less application support (don't show me 500 aim clones that Linux has, OS X can run those through X11 and fink anways, show me the Office or Photoshop or Quicken apps)
And a nighmare getting periferals configured and working
Oh and generally really crappy battery life, with (as much as I like Linux) the worlds worst power management features and tools.
Look, I love using Linux and it is the only OS on my desktops (except for one headless windows box for the sporatic DLL or ISAPI I have to write). However, after owning a few top of the line Dell notebooks and Thinkpads, I will never go back to x86 based laptops now that I have a powerbook. Having everything from power management, wireless, long battery life, and application compatibility just working is such a nice way to live
Finkployd
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".
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
Agreed. For a tech-oriented site, slashdot is very quick to decry most techonological advances.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Oh, wait...
You must think in Russian.
I'm the webmaster there. Does anyone have a mirror site that we can host the images off? My server is my home machine, a PII 266.
I really hate to having to guess (from the url) the year of an old post. Please, show the year in the post date. It's just 4 chars, man! Am I missing something ?
It's been a long, long time since I've been enticed by any piece of consumer electronics.
I'm not a gadget freak anymore, really.
But dammit! Apple have created an object of sheer desirability in the iPod - and especially in the iPod mini.
Despite my (iBod) nickname, It's been many years since I've owned an Apple product (the last was the ill-fated Newton).
I think Apple really understand which buttons to press to get hip, design-aware customers longing for their products (not that I include myself in that demograph). When they've got the trendsetters, the rest will follow.
Credit and kudos where it's due. Apple have a killer product that is even making iPod buyers switch from PCs to Macs, allegedly.
IMHO there will be no 'iPod killer' because nobody understands the intended market for these devices better than Apple.
No self-respecting kid will thank you for getting him/her a 'no-name' MP3 player this Christmas instead of an iPod.
...sounds like a scottish pyschopath!
:-]
Jaj
It's not like they were even thinking about making an mp3 player until someone pitched the idea to them.
Apple have no vision beyond making already established ideas better. They're no better than Microsoft in terms of innovation. Microsoft tends to let other people release products, analyse why they suceed/fail and then improve them in some way.
Apple do the same, but tend to focus on simplicity and the visual design. They like the "cool" factor that makes their products appeal to designers and the in-crowd.
In fact, OSX follows this concept. They've taken already written software (kernel, X windows etc), improved it and grafted a slick interface on the front.
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.
Err.... I own an iPod, I think it's great, and I realise that it's made Apple a lot of money, but is sticking a nice GUI and interface on a mini HDD and packaging it nicely really anywhere close to as "important" as, say, the first personal computer? No? What about the first GUI for a consumer OS? No again? Or, if we're going to talk in terms of cash cows, how about the iMac, which actually saved Apple? If the company was on its last financial legs before the iPod's debut, I could see calling it one of their most important releases, but making a profitable company more profitable by taking exiting ideas and technology and simply doing them better than anyone else, while significant, can't be compared to innovations that changed the world forever à la MacOS or Apple I.
In conclusion, profitable =/= important
and the TFA is a POS.
I can easy follow your idea, and I think you got my point too=)
People with iPod's indicate, that they are 100% for design, and not features or eletronics and sound quality. The PCM2705 from TI that is in the iPod is a NOT a high end DAC! In fact, a low cost DAC =(
Caution: Linky NSFW.
Dr. Freud
Technology meets Transportation.
Raise your hand if you have iTunes ...
...
...
...
:-D
Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port
Raise your hand if you have both
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device
There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod.
~LoudMusic
October 23rd, 2001. Priceless.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
http://www.rockbox.org/playerhistory/
It may surprise some people to see that the iPod was announced a full two years after the first harddisk-based mp3 player.
That's because the Slashdot crowd seems to be fairly pragmatic.
/. crowd mostly thinks in terms of "what can you do for me NOW," and as a result, you get a lot of people saying "Gee, [innovation] won't lead to anything useful with the next year or two, so it's not important to me." The sad part is, they're right most of the time. Don't believe me? Go grab an issue of Popular Science or Popular Mechanics from the mid-1980s.
Most technological advances that make the news here are in-development technologies that may or may not bear fruit in five to ten years. And if anything, the experience of the last 50 years should have taught us that no matter how many times flying cars and nuclear fusion are predicted to be 10 years off, they seem to be perpetually 10 years off.
I think the
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
You're actually kinda right.
Despite being a mac user, I'm sorta annoying to be flooded by the numerous fans who post so much it decreases the signal/noise ratio in the forums.
But then again, it's no different when there's a GPL/OpenSource/Linux related article. All of the fans of open source come out in one giant clusterfuck to either applaud a decision, mention "of course it'd be better open source" without actually thinking about the implications, and all the "down with BSD/MIT/etc, all hail RMS and the GPL" type posts.
Really, there's no way to solve this cuz there's too many cheerleaders of insert-favorite-tech-here.
regard to the IPod being not an inovation. MP3 players have been around for ages.
Invention is not required for innovation. Yes there were small players before the iPod, and larger capacity players before the iPod, but there weren't any other players that had a large capacity in a compact form factor. There was nothing else like the iPod at the time of its introduction. Nothing. That, and the industry has followed Apple in making small size-high capacity players, most with hard drives. How is that *not* the definition of innovation?
Apple just have great marketing. That's all there is to it.
Snob. The iPod is a phenomenon because Apple made a product with the best combination of features and it took a very long time before anyone could touch them. And its *still* arguably a superior product because of its interface and software integration. Apple's compeditors seem to think they'll have an "iPod killer" on their hands if they take a billeted list its features and one up them. But just because your player has a couple more hours of batter life and costs $40 less doesn't automatically mean you have a better product on your hands. The iPod succeeded because it had a great mix of features, and to beat it your player will have to do the same.
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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