> The contemporaneous iPod _was_ technically and acoustically inferior to the Nomad.

You're cherry-picking your "technicals". The click wheel hardware and software implementation (especially the UI response time) was (and still is) revolutionary.

iPod won on the technical merits; just not the ones you're focusing.

The anti-Apple crowd on here loves to crow about how Apple only wins on marketing. Look I find the ads cringe as fuck too, but let's not pretend that the hardware isn't much, much better than average.

Better than all? No certainly not, Apple's build quality loses out to plenty of much more premium products. But it generally sits head and shoulders above the average build quality of any given product category, which seems to be the niche they most aim for: "the upmarket version of the common offering." That ones that immediately come to mind are Macbooks and iPads.