this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
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And those people weren't wrong at the time. The iPod wasn't successful in its first few generations. It didn't become successful until several generations later after they changed a bunch of the problems with it. One of the aspects that makes Apple so successful is that they're willing to stick with a new product for many years while they keep working on figuring out what the device needs to become a good product.
It was successful immediately because there literally wasn’t any other player in the world that had its capacity and physical size.
Everything else lacked mass market appeal because it couldn’t hold enough songs or couldn’t fit in your pocket.
Not to mention the vast majority of the population didn’t know how to pirate music, and most music stores were shit compare to iTunes(and that is not a great endorsement).
The only huge barrier to adoption was the initial FireWire only model, but I’d be willing to bet even with that restriction they sold more units in the first year than any other model of music player.
Whether or not it was successful initially isn't a matter of opinion, it's matter of fact. Compared to other personal music players on the market, the number of ipods was not high for the first several generations.
I don't believe this at all as they were insanely popular when they came out.
How very truthiness of you. Are you a Republican? Go to this linked webpage and search for "Sales of iPod by Year" and you'll see that the first couple of years of ipod sales are relatively very small
https://marketsplash.com/ipod-statistics/
Wow I had no idea (or didn't remember) those even existed. I thought it came out around 2005 when the nano was released.
Yeah that's it exactly. When it finally exploded, it EXPLODED, but for the first few years it had relatively very low sales. But Apple stuck with it and kept fixing the major flaws that it initially shipped with, and once enough flaws were fixed it went gangbusters seemingly overnight.
Same with the apple headset. It has some major flaws, as people have rightly pointed out, and as a result it's not gonna be a huge seller at first. But Apple will likely stick with it and keep improving the flaws and eventually it might be another iPod level success. Or it might be another failure like the touchbar era laptops. Time will tell.