<story><title>Apple Introduces What It Calls an Easier to Use Portable Music Player (2001)</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/24/business/technology-apple-introduces-what-it-calls-an-easier-to-use-portable-music-player.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulmd</author><text>There were also CD players that could play MP3s burned on a data disc.  That bridged the &amp;quot;capacity gap&amp;quot; - 640&amp;#x2F;700 MB was a lot of MP3s at the time, especially since people used lower bitrates.  Remember, the first iPod was only 5 GB.&lt;p&gt;The big problem was the interface, it really sucked to try and navigate a couple hundred MP3s on a one-line display.</text></item><item><author>oneplane</author><text>That last line about raising the bar... and raise it did! Apple often doesn&amp;#x27;t invent the whole thing, but definitely puts a usable version on the market. I remember the space between CD players and iPods having those rather crappy MP3 players, mini-disc players (which were actually quite good, but still used cartridges) and the really big laptop-HDD music players, and none of them were actually nice to use, or at least, not any &amp;#x27;nicer&amp;#x27; than a portable CD player.&lt;p&gt;This happened over and over again with the other stuff they made. It&amp;#x27;s not like there were no phones with touchscreens, or no tablets, or no smartwatches, TV media players etc. There always are&amp;#x2F;were&amp;#x2F;will be, but it&amp;#x27;s becoming something of a trend that Apple gets it&amp;#x27;s hands on one of those ideas and then puts a version on the market that actually works well for most people.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toyg</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;  CD players that could play MP3s [...] bridged the &amp;quot;capacity gap&amp;quot; &lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;But collecting and (forever) burning collections was a royal pain in the ass. Plus, CD readers would struggle and skip&amp;#x2F;stop&amp;#x2F;jump all the time as they bounced in your pocket or in your bag.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; The big problem was the interface&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Absolutely. A lot of cheap Chinese sticks wouldn&amp;#x27;t even understand filesystem structures deeper than one level. To be fair though, the iPod Shuffle was basically like that and still sold very well; the reality distortion field was in full force at that time.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple Introduces What It Calls an Easier to Use Portable Music Player (2001)</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/24/business/technology-apple-introduces-what-it-calls-an-easier-to-use-portable-music-player.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>paulmd</author><text>There were also CD players that could play MP3s burned on a data disc.  That bridged the &amp;quot;capacity gap&amp;quot; - 640&amp;#x2F;700 MB was a lot of MP3s at the time, especially since people used lower bitrates.  Remember, the first iPod was only 5 GB.&lt;p&gt;The big problem was the interface, it really sucked to try and navigate a couple hundred MP3s on a one-line display.</text></item><item><author>oneplane</author><text>That last line about raising the bar... and raise it did! Apple often doesn&amp;#x27;t invent the whole thing, but definitely puts a usable version on the market. I remember the space between CD players and iPods having those rather crappy MP3 players, mini-disc players (which were actually quite good, but still used cartridges) and the really big laptop-HDD music players, and none of them were actually nice to use, or at least, not any &amp;#x27;nicer&amp;#x27; than a portable CD player.&lt;p&gt;This happened over and over again with the other stuff they made. It&amp;#x27;s not like there were no phones with touchscreens, or no tablets, or no smartwatches, TV media players etc. There always are&amp;#x2F;were&amp;#x2F;will be, but it&amp;#x27;s becoming something of a trend that Apple gets it&amp;#x27;s hands on one of those ideas and then puts a version on the market that actually works well for most people.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>galago</author><text>My first MP3 player was solid state and cheap, but it only had 32MB of storage. I would put 5 or 6 songs on it in the morning and listen to them on my way to work. I think a lot of my music back then was from Napster, and I intentionally sought out low-bit rate files. The iPod seemed fantastically expensive.</text></comment>