Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

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> Bluetooth headphones were around for over a decade with a lot of people ignoring them before Airpods popularized them.

This is just flat-out wrong.

They may have shot up in popularity after phones stopped having headphone jacks, but there was certainly a Bluetooth headphone market before that.

> Personal media players weren't nearly as mainstream before the iPod.

Again, wayyyyy off base.

Personal CD players were VERY popular and common in the late 90s. I'd wager Napster and the advent of CD burners popularized them even more.

> Almost all of these product markets existed and mostly catered to niche audiences before Apple jumped in.

Cringe. This reeks of the attitude common attitude around 2010 where Apple fanboys would praise Steve Jobs for his innovation when Apple would implement a feature into iPhone that Android had for years.

> If there's one thing Apple excels at, its convincing the mass market to adopt technologies that currently only cater to a niche audience.

They excel at UI/UX. From a purely technical standpoint, they're often a couple years behind, but if you polish the crap out of it, people don't notice.

Seeing people with Bluetooth headphones was a rarity 10 years ago. They existed, yes, but so did smartphones before the iPhone. Some people had them, but the vast majority of the market of headphones or phones didn't care.

By personal media players, I'm talking about MP3 players and iPod-like devices. Essentially post-CD players. They existed, they weren't popular. Even the initial iPod took a while to gain a real market presence.

I'm not an Apple fanboy, but I can definitely acknowledge there were lots of markets which were largely ignored by the mass market until Apple made it cool and easy to use. I had a 3G phone which could do video calls when the iPhone came out, so I definitely understand that Apple isn't usually on the bleeding edge of technology, they're just the ones that often manage to refine it enough to be acceptable by the mass market.

> By personal media players, I'm talking about MP3 players and iPod-like devices. Essentially post-CD players. They existed, they weren't popular.

They weren't popular because they just simply sucked.

Flash memory was still expensive, so they'd usually only have enough room for 10 songs at the most. They didn't have displays to see file names, which I suppose isn't a big deal when you only have 10 songs.

> Even the initial iPod took a while to gain a real market presence.

I don't even consider the iPod to be innovative in any way besides maybe the click wheel. It was just that the iPod was the first product that was actually designed to be a good product and not a cheap money grab designed to get a few dollars from all the Napster users.

To put it more bluntly, IMO, all the other products were made by boneheads. The iPod was the bare minimum of what an MP3 player should have been. It wasn't innovative, it just wasn't made by boneheads.

Personally, I had always expected MP3 CD players to become a thing. I didn't like the iPod's idea of a hard drive (Though they weren't the first to make a portable MP3 player that used a hard drive). I expected them to have high failure rates from head crashes.

As someone who owned mp3 players, portable CD players, and portable mini disc mp3 players, and did not find itunes or the scroll wheel appealing, the iPod's main innovation was almost entirely just "heavy marketing".

iTunes was the killer app, not the ipod.

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