![]() Burn." ad campaign? They showed the ease of ripping music to your Mac from CDs you owned. ![]() The iPod included no form of DRM and received some criticism that the iPod would only proliferate piracy. Music piracy was an especially hot topic at the time. They were proud of the work they put into their libraries and cleaning up their audio file ID3 tags and customizing their WinAmp player. People would boast about how many songs and gigabytes their library consumed and how they organized it. Managing your own music library was a burden to be proud of. Then you had to connect your iPod to your computer, fire up iTunes, sync your music, then disconnect it before you could play it.īut it was a different time. So either you purchased them on some other website, pirated them from Napster, BitTorrent, Scour, IRC, Kazaa, LimeWire and their ilk or ripped them from a CD. The iTunes Music Store had not come out yet, nor were there any music streaming subscription services yet. First off, you had to have your own music library of MP3 files on your computer. Using the iPod still wasn't easy by today's standards. But it was elegant, easy to use and when paired with iTunes, it was the complete package. , it wasn't the first MP3 player and it definitely was not the cheapest with it's $399 price point at launch. It wasn’t the most storage you could get in an MP3 player at the time 1 The white cord and earbuds became so popular Apple leaned into them for a whole series of iPod dancing "silhouette" commercials.Īll of these things combined made the iPod something the industry had to take note of. Apple knew the iPod would live in your pocket and they needed a way to signal that you had one (and of course white to match the iPod itself). White headphones: We expect it now with Apple devices, but at the time every other device came with black headphones and a black cord. Large backlit display: Featuring an LED-backlit LCD display with 160x128 resolution, the iPod could display six lines of text and song details at a glance.ĬD-quality sound: While it wasn't a huge feature of the iPod, Apple boasted that the included headphones featured Neodymium transducer magnets to help you get enhanced frequency response to get the most out of the high-bitrate songs. Notably, iTunes made it easy to create playlists and the iPod made them easy to play. ITunes + Auto-sync + Playlists: Apple made sure to make it known that the iPod with iTunes was the first "complete and seamless MP3 music solution." Using iTunes to manage your music and automatically sync it with your iPod was a dream compared to the clunky software required for other MP3 players. This also had the benefit of increasing battery life to 10 hours by limiting how often the hard drive needs to spin up. ![]() The iPod had 20 minutes of anti-skip protection thanks to its built-in 32MB flash memory buffer. but it's still a shiny brick.Īnti-skip protection: The downside with hard-drive based mp3 players is they would skip when moved around. I'll dive into it more later.Įlegant industrial design: As mentioned above, this thing is beautiful. Scroll wheel: This usefulness and simplicity of this cannot be overstated. You could load a CD onto your iPod in 10 seconds about 30 times faster than other devices. Speed: The iPod used FireWire 400 instead of much slower USB 1.1 like competitive devices used at the time. Other players used traditional 2.5" notebook hard drives. This was made possible by the iPod's 1.8-inch hard drive, something Apple's head of engineering first discovered from Toshiba while on a trip to Japan. With the iPod you didn't have to choose between portability and storage. Size + Storage: While there were other devices like the Creative Nomad Jukebox and Archos Jukebox with 6GB drives, they were almost the size of CD players. ![]() The iPod was a noteworthy device for a few reasons: You were different maybe a creative even. It said something about you the same way using a Mac vs a PC said something about you at the time. This was not just an audio player you used to play music. Its stellar industrial design turned heads. It was a sleek, shiny stainless steel and white device the size of a deck of cards. There were also other options like MP3 CD Players and Sony MiniDisc players (I loved my MZ-R70). They were often cluttered with buttons, had subpar software and were hard to navigate. None of them were easy to use or elegant. Few were usable with just one hand on the go. Various portable MP3 and MP3 CD players in the early 2000s.
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