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Comment by FrankWilhoit | Hacker News Reader

Jobs's focus on the customer experience was useless because he judged the customer by himself. "Be like me and you will have a good experience" is not clever marketing; it is abuse.

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Use an MP3 player from before the iPod existed and then try an iPod classic. Same with smart phones. There is no way you're going to convince most people that what you say is true in any general sense.

Sure, simplification means having to have some opinionated ways of doing things because you're removing options, but there's a very real benefit that can come out of it.

If anything, it makes the current state of Apple that much more sad.

I had an MP3 player before the iPod. It was a CD-based player, and it was pretty good.

I think, iPod was really one of the first users of 1.8" hard drives, so it was better than the competition simply because Apple had access to better hardware.

I disagree. Apple had no monopoly on 1.8" hard drives nor most of the other components in the original iPod (except maybe the scroll wheel itself?); they were merely among the first to apply it into a media player. It was the UI that was groundbreaking. You could switch from an album, to and artist, to a playlist, to a specific song all within seconds with your thumb. CD-based mp3 players were ok, but were battery hogs and updating playlists/music/etc was a hassle as one had to burn CDs. The UIs for most were "useable" at best.

Apple did have clever, original, and good marketing, but the product (iPod) was so clearly better than anything that came before it, either way. And that was my original point against the prior comment that the customer experience was just "be like Steve Jobs" and then it's good.

The first Apple iPods only had FireWire which was exotic here, so they were not at all popular. I had a Rio (Nitrus, I think?) that was released within a year from iPod's release. When I first interacted with an iPod a couple of years later, I was not at all impressed.

I didn't have a NOMAD, but Slashdot's "no wireless, less space than a NOMAD, lame" tagline was pretty much on point. Its marketing was great, however.

"No wireless, less space than a nomad, but can be fully synced up and fast-charged in a few minutes" is what the review should have been. USB support came after when usb2 was "good enough". Syncing and creating playlists with other players was usually awful, slow, and the bundled software was not much better. iTunes was (at least at the time before the iTunes Store) quite lean and mean, too.

I'm not saying the iPod was perfect, though later versions got pretty close. But the "no wireless" part of the review still makes me chuckle. There were few hand-held anything that leveraged it at any truly useful level until proper smartphones existed.

I dunno, for a while it was the most valuable company on the planet. While you might not like his judgment it seems plenty of people did.

So you approve of ads then since it makes the company more valuable?

Saying it's abuse is quite the overstatement. It's certainly opinionated design.

Contrasted to Microsoft's philosophy where no one is allowed to have a good experience, it's a breath of fresh air.

This might be the worst take I've ever read on this website.

I'm a lifetime Mac user who has bought exactly one iPhone (the 3G S) before switching to Android. I'm definitely not in the Jobs reality distortion field.

But I do remember how the iPod was better than every similar thing at the time, and how people spent _years_ clamoring for Apple to harness that same focus to make a phone. Apple had to go out and buy the iPhone name because that's what it had been colloquially called for years before it was announced.

There are plenty of things Apple has done wrong, many by Steve personally, but you can't seriously claim that his taste was only applicable to him.

Don't denigrate the meaning of the word "abuse" to make your hot take spicier.

as someone who bought the creativelabs mp3 player back in the day, the ipod was absolutely better and I was just being some combination of cheap and contrarian

I had a Zen Stone, which was made by... Creative!

It was much, much better than an iPod. I had an iPod first. I gave it away, because it was too heavy to carry around.

The Zen Stone was essentially weightless and could be operated without looking at it. The only problem I ever had with it was that it couldn't charge and play at the same time.

googling, I think I had the nomad zen extra first then the zen vision w the built-in divx player for watching videos (which I never did, and it was an expensive way to learn that I'm not gonna watch a movie on a handheld screen)

I loved them both very much, much more than I love any gadget I own now

for something useless it worked very, extraordinarily well

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