The Diamond Rio comes to mind, as probably the first consumer one to get much attention (but "much attention" is relative, and it was still a niche market), but with only 32MB of storage, it was underwhelming (but also years earlier, in 1998).
The Remote Solutions Personal Jukebox looks to have been the first of the models to use a laptop drive instead of small and expensive flash, but at $799 for 4.8GB, it was very pricey (1999).
The Creative NOMAD Jukebox in late 2000 had 6GB for $429.
In late 2001, Apple introduces the iPod, which at 4GB for $399, is actually not quite as good in a dollar per GB metric.
I think it's clear that it's not really the idea that made the iPod take off, but the marketing, polish, and IMO most importantly, that they had a real software company work on it rather than a bunch of EE people. Not to denigrate electrical engineers, but often it's a different type of programming that goes into UI and UX, and having people that have worked on that for years can matter quite a bit.
> but the marketing, polish, and IMO most importantly, that they had a real software company
I think it is important to remember that when the iPod came out, iTunes already existed. Not the iTunes store, mind you, but iTunes as a solution to (legally) rip your existing CDs (and automatically get the tags/meta-information from OCDDB or so), and manage songs downloaded from Napster (less legally).
So, people had a good platform to listen to music on the desktop, nicely managed with lots of meta-information (tags, time last played, rankings, etc).
Now, with the iPod, you could JUST PLUG IT IN, and it would download the whole shebang within a couple of minutes (via Firewire), and offer it in a nice interface. THAT was a quantum leap in usability compared with all other devices on the market at the time.
I had a minidisk player, and you could add artist and song titles manually on the device (selecting a letter at a time with a left/right cursor), and my, what a pain it was.
Just having your whole (carefully curated) music library on the go in a a few minutes on the iPod was AWESOME.
Wikipedia's iTunes history [1] says iPod support came in October 2001 (i.e. when the iPod was released), and Rio One support in December 2001, and doesn't really mention other MP3 players.
At any rate, the faithfulness with which the iPod presented the iTunes music library was great.
January 9, 2001: "Apple Introduces iTunes — World’s Best and Easiest To Use Jukebox Software"
"download songs to popular MP3 players from Rio and Creative Labs with plug-and-play simplicity with no extra software or complicated driver installations required."
iTunes as a solution to (legally) rip your existing CDs
Technically, this wasn't any more legal than recording a CD to a cassette tape. It's still an infringing copy. It's just that nobody was ever sued for it, as far as I'm aware, and it's since been legalized in some places.
There were a few CDs with anti-rip technology (including the famous Sony rootkit CDs), but the industry largely gave up on that after losing the DRM war.
If workable DRM had been deployed fast enough, neither Napster nor the iPod would have existed. That's part of why the fight against DRM is important.
Actually it was legal - there was a piece of legislation on the time that called "fair use" make local copies for you own usage. So if you owned a CD, it was fair use to copy to your own iPod.
But Apple was actually marketing iTunes with the slogan
"Rip. Mix. Burn." and put out this awesome ad featuring De La Soul, Iggy Pop, Barry White, and others. Check it out:
I'd add though that, while the initial iPod received a generally positive reception, there was the usual Apple critique that it was on the pricey side. And there really wasn't a general market perception right away that everything was different now. For one thing, iTunes originally ran only on Macs--and Apple wasn't saying publicly that would ever change--so iPods were mostly usable with laptops/desktops that were pretty niche at the time.
Exactly. I bought a Diamond Rio when it first came out, but it was early. It was difficult to explain to non-techies.
Apple figured out how to tap into the early adopters and make them influencers to bring in the early majority. Part of this was making it easier for people to be able to get music on to the thing. iTunes had just come out shortly before the iPod and started hitting its stride in tandem with the device.
At one point I had a solid-state Sony NW-MS7 Memory Stick Walkman (that wasn't quite an MP3 player because it was limited to only playing ATRAC files). For 1999, it was a usable and forward-looking piece of tech. Pity they crippled it with aforementioned ATRAC-only encoding (requiring file format conversion and re-encoding) and expensive Memory Stick proprietary media.
Ah yes, Sony and expensive proprietary media. I remember paying a small fortune (for a teenager) for an 8 MB Memory Stick for use with the PlayStation 2.
Even if it's not a lot of mp3, I was able to change the mp3 without buying something and this at that time was a revolution. Even if it was not perfect, they made the revolution Apple did nothing.
The Remote Solutions Personal Jukebox looks to have been the first of the models to use a laptop drive instead of small and expensive flash, but at $799 for 4.8GB, it was very pricey (1999).
The Creative NOMAD Jukebox in late 2000 had 6GB for $429.
In late 2001, Apple introduces the iPod, which at 4GB for $399, is actually not quite as good in a dollar per GB metric.
I think it's clear that it's not really the idea that made the iPod take off, but the marketing, polish, and IMO most importantly, that they had a real software company work on it rather than a bunch of EE people. Not to denigrate electrical engineers, but often it's a different type of programming that goes into UI and UX, and having people that have worked on that for years can matter quite a bit.
1: http://www.pcworld.com/article/174725/evolution_of_the_mp3_p...