Hacker News Reader

The iPod's success showed that yes, industrial design and UX do matter and can beat a spec list.

That was actually the common wisdom at the time, as I recall.

Qualifying that statement with "at the time" is being awfully generous to the present.

Because a spec list doesn't matter compared to the marketing engine that is Apple. Many superior products fell afoul of that.

Before the iPod/iMac, Apple didn't have that marketing engine. They didn't have that stellar reputation. They built that from nothing with a single generation of products.

Today, Apple occupies a special place in the market that very few players could approach. In 2000? That market was wide open for anybody who could get their crap together and do the same things Apple did - well-designed products with a good marketing campaign. The PC industry was only just starting to abandon the ugly beige metal boxes.

Now, 14 years later, we have ugly black boxes.

The iPod was demonstrably and objectively superior to its early competitors in an important way: you could navigate to your songs more quickly and easily.