An mp3 player was in every kid's jeans pocket before the ipod was even announced.[0] Its innovation was costing twice as much and having white earphones, which made it suitable as a wealth-signaling fashion accessory.
Yes. This entire thread is bizarre. The iPod, when it was introduced, was dollar for dollar easily the worst mp3 player on the market. It won because it was massively marketed, people found it pretty, it was tied in with Apple's other products and a marketplace, and the same people who wanted a candy-colored computer (and a candy-colored New Volkswagen Beetle that matched it) wanted the thing in the billboards with the MTV silhouette dancing against a brightly colored background.
I'd say that their innovation was that round touch slider thingie that added nothing to the functionality but confusion, but was fun to use.
Every kid did not have an mp3 player. I saw a wide variety of music players. No single product came close to market domination until the ipod. Kid's were all using different products like mini-disc players, cd players, mp3 players, walkmans, it was all over the place.
It could be location based but you are wrong for most areas on planet earth. Many kids went from cd player to ipod because mp3 players were too expensive as a replacement for something you had that already solution for. Convincing your parents you needed more songs was laughable at the time. If anything, more children got mp3 players AFTER the iPod became popular. The excuse for a better product was more palatable due to the iPod's popularity.
I meant to imply that mp3 players were too expensive "at the time", compared to a cd player.
I was not saying other mp3 players were more expensive than ipods. I could have been more clear there. Mp3 Players were more expensive than CD Players thus adoption was slow in the beginning, but the popularity of the ipod changed the mindset surrounding digital media players in general.
Once the ipod exploded in popularity many more mp3 players were sold to those who couldn't afford apple prices.
The previous poster was saying that EVERY kid had an mp3 player before ipods blew up where the opposite is true.
First, not nearly every kid. When the iPod came out my PMP-300 was still relatively novel; much more common was MP3 CD players, which skipped like hell even if you could put them in your pocket.
The market was also divided in a way that's hard to imagine today, something like an iFP or PMP was like taking a single tape/CD with you. But the Jukebox (the infamous Nomad) and some other lines were really "put all your music here; this now is your music collection." The iPod was the first pocket-sized player that supported this mode. (And the iPod Shuffle probably the last in the line of the former style.)
> An mp3 player was in every kid's jeans pocket before the ipod was even announced
This is a strange statement. I grew up in the Bay Area and a CD player was in my hands/in the back pocket of my backpack for the longest time. It wasn't until the second iPod Mini that I even knew what an iPod was.
Didn't the iPod blow all of the other MP3 players out of the water in storage capacity cause Apple got some of the first access to tiny HDD's while everything else was using flash storage?
It (in)famously had "less space than a Nomad", but from my >20-year-old anecdotal experience, everyone I knew then had Diamondback Rios and the likes with maybe 64MB of CF storage, as you said.
An mp3 player was in every kid's jeans pocket before the ipod was even announced.[0] Its innovation was costing twice as much and having white earphones, which made it suitable as a wealth-signaling fashion accessory.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_media_player#The_MP3_...