I think it’s a little of both. Sure, they have failures, not no one is perfect.

I think the iPad is a good example. Bill Gates had a dream of the paperless office and tried to make the tablet PC happens by putting Windows XP on tablets with some pen support. I saw a few of them in my help desk days in college, but they never really caught on. They put a desktop OS on a tablet and it was annoying to use. They also tried handheld devices with the UMPCs, these were also a pain to use, and again, just ran XP.

Then the iPad came along. It didn’t just run OS X, it ran an OS designed around the way you’d interact with it. It was executed better. Steve Jobs also sold the hell out of it with all his “magic” talk. 15 years later and the iPad is still the only tablet anyone really talks about. Microsoft had a 10+ year head start, but failed to execute and market. They didn’t understand what they were actually making. Android tried to copy the iPad model with a mobile OS, but they didn’t seem to go all-in, so it felt half baked. Much of the iPad “marketing” is word of mouth. My dad had 2 iPads and loves them. He was sold on it by seeing be use one back in 2010 to take note and a conference we went to. He spent more time looking at the iPad than the speakers. Ironically, I don’t have an iPad anymore, it never fit into my workflow, but for many it does.

The marketing only works to remind people of the products of the core product executes well. Marketing alone won’t save a bad product. This is especially true when trying to create a category. Apple has seemed more successful with category creation than just about anyone else. They may not be first, but they define the market and get people to care about it. They did this with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. MP3 players, smart phones, tablets, and smart watches existed before, but were fairly niche. Apple made them mainstream and opened up the market for others to be more successful as well. We can likely credit Apple with that modern laptop as well, starting with the MacBook Air, and then raising the bar on battery life with their new chips. They pushed the whole industry forward. This wasn’t marketing, it was execution. Having 24 hours of battery life in a thin and light package was simply better than the other options on the market.

Against using Nomad a strong counterexample: they were almost certainly developing the device before the Nomad came out, so they might have been innovative in the sense that they were working on a device that they hadn’t seen before.

In my recollection, though, a bigger hard drive did not really feel like an innovation. It might have just been that I was a kid, but my music library was not so huge, and it was possible to reduce the file sizes anyway (especially given how crappy ear buds were at the time, and anyway, how good was the dac in a cheap mp3 player at the time?).

We were used to the idea that hard drive sizes might make a big jump anyway, it was still the era of dramatic leaps and bounds.

Finally, you probably had a binder full of CDs anyway (burned CDs if you were cool of course), so you could play them in a car. So, the concept of having much more “drive space” in some sense was not at all new. (And the UI of a binder full of CDs is much more intuitive than any MP3 player!).

Rather, the iPod didn’t really have any big new ideas. It’s just that nothing about it sucked. The hard drive was pretty big, the UI was good enough, the clickey wheel thing was fun, the audio quality was fine. No new ideas, B+ all around, and nothing to make you want to given up on it.

That’s a really cool link! One guy predicted it very well:

> Second, I think Apple is using this as a "sneaky" device to sneak large capacity hard drives into our pockets. Basically, once we're used to carrying around something like this, they can build on it. Add the PalmOS or OSX/CE (OK, bad joke, but you get the idea) and you have a PDA with more massive storage than any other. Add a firewire connection to some optics and you have a video camera with 10 hours of battery life, smaller and easier to conceal than Sony's smallest. The thing I like about the video camera idea is that with tapeless storage, editing is much, much faster, and with the disk unit in your pocket, the camera can be really tiny and lightweight and still have a lot of features. Basically, once they up the drive capacity to 20GB (maybe 3-6 months?), that's enough for 90 minutes of broadcast quality digital video, enough for almost any common event! Think about it. This is just an iSeed iPod. Many other things can and probably will grow out of it.

Fair points about intense marketing and less successful products being forgotten in history. However, I wasn't able to find anything about the first (6 GB) Nomad Jukebox on Wikipedia. The iPod was released in October 2001, I only see mentions of the Jukebox later than that.

What does the "no wireless" complaint refer to? I don't see any mention of wireless connections for any of the Nomad Jukeboxes either.

Besides the point: I personally find the Nomad Jukebox and other MP3 players from the era extremely ugly, while the iPod looks beautiful and has become an icon (yes, Rams-inspired, but that's not a bad thing). I say this as a decidedly non-Apple-fanboy, but as an industrial designer.

I would if I could!

Apple has been a mess since they lost Steve Jobs.