Zune was probably a better player. It was too late, and arrived when MS didn't much care.

There are emails unearthed in various lawsuits where you can read Bill Gates screaming at his subordinates: "why the hell can't our partners like Sony and Creative create a similar device? Give them all, give them early access to everything, work with them". In the end MS felt compelled to make their own.

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bayindirh 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sony can't be bothered to compete with Apple in that era. They were trying to recover from their DRM dreams, and their devices were already sounding great with in-house software and hardware.

Creative's Muvo^2 already was the poor man's iPod with surprisingly good audio quality as well.

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cptskippy 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good.

When the iPod came out you largely had two options for carrying your music collection on the go. You either carried a binder of CDs, or you had some niche player like Mini-Disc or an MP3 player. Both alternatives were expensive and had limitations similar to a CD in terms of number of tracks you could carry.

I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality.

Creative's Muvo was a weird form factor that was larger than an iPod. It had a horrid interface both on device and for loading music. It's only grace was that it was slightly cheaper than an iPod and didn't need a Mac with FireWire. Although iircc this was pre USB 2.0 so not having FireWire would mean loading music took forever and a day.

The iPod allowed you to carry most, if not all, of your music collection in a package slightly larger than a deck of playing cards. And it had a fantastic interface for navigating music on the device.

This was at a time before most people had laptops and if you had a PC it was at home and used sparingly. The iPod was such a compelling mobile computing device that it drove adoption of the iMac. Apple would eventually release iTunes for Windows and USB support but that was many years later.

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skipkey 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The iPod’s user interface was good once you figured it out. I bought a 2nd gen one, I think, because it was the only large capacity device that supported audible audiobooks, and the UI frustrated the heck out of me. I consistently had trouble navigating it.

Then it clicked, the control, no matter what it looked like, it wasn’t a d-pad. It was a weird touchpad emulating a physical dial. Which exactly nothing in the documentation that it came with mentioned.

I worked for Microsoft at the time, and took a lot of grief for not using a Zune. Except I owned one, bought cheaply at the company store. It just never supported Audible.

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thewebguyd 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality.

I had something similar. The storage was the iPod's killer feature, along with iTune's $0.99 songs. Suddenly you no longer had to buy whole albums, and you didn't have to swap out what was on your MP3 player every day when you wanted a different playlist. A 5GB hard drive in your pocket was a huge innovation then.

	▲	fckgw 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"1000 songs in your pocket" was the entire driving force behind the thing. It was constantly bellowed in the marketing and it's what Steve Jobs demanded of the engineering team from day one. The size and the storage were paramount and they knew no one else could match it.

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jonhohle 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I had a Rio Volt which somewhat bridged the gap. 700MB mp3 CD/RWs (about 10 hours of music per disc) and a CD player when traveling and picking up new music. Not as small as an iPod, but no book of CDs was necessary, either.

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peezd 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yep this was really it. The amount of storage on the ipod was amazing and just opened up the idea that "yes you put your full music collection on it".

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troupo an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> I feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good.

Indeed. Apple made (and showed) the actual reasoning in the iPod introduction. All competitors had to was do the same: https://youtu.be/bz1ZWvZBGYM?is=NFlmkhq1gWfcNVgv

- 1000 songs

- play all popular formats: mp3, wav, aiff

- Firewire for fast transfers. Download 1000 songs at 30x speed than USB

- 10 hours continuous playback on single rechargeable battery

- the size of a card deck

Not like it was magical unknown hardware components at the time. And the competition still couldn't do it for almost a decade

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cosmic_cheese 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Zune was probably a better player.

In some ways, anyway. Never owned a Zune myself, but a university classmate did and I was shocked by how poorly it handled non-Latin languages… she had a ton of Japanese and Korean songs loaded onto it, and their metadata all displayed as "missing character" blocks. She used it a lot like one might use an iPod Shuffle despite it having a nice screen because the only way to tell what was playing was by hearing it play.

By contrast my 4th gen B&W iPod which was about 5-6 years older handled unicode just fine.

	▲	VCFundedGenYer 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		IIRC the Zune had a much better DAC on the device than any ipod. I own two of them and the sound quality was always notably great.

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unsupp0rted 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It let you squirt over a song to your friend

https://youtu.be/ud6rwVkbovA

And they could listen to it 3 times in 3 days

	▲	ralfd 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		“Squirting” was ridiculed at the time and the word itself scaring away women. Jobs killed it then in an interview with a classic quote: Microsoft = Cold tech and Apple = Humanity. MS scares her away, Apple gets the girl. > QUESTION: Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried? > Steve Jobs: In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.