Failure in the PC marketspace doesn't mean that having great hardware gets you nowhere. It simply means that the Mac wasn't better than a Wintel PC by a large enough margin for people to consider switching.
Exactly! And the same was true of the iPod in the beginning... There just wasn't enough of a compelling reason to really separate it from the pack; at least until the iTunes Music Store - this was the true innovation of the iPod something that nobody else had been able to pull of (legally)
You're right in that what makes them successful is the ecosystem. But from their ecosystem, it is the end to end integration on the focus of the user experience that makes them successful, not from the consumer lockdown.
The way I see it, the "consumer lockdown" is responsible for the successful user experience. This is nothing new for Apple, of course. The've been doing business this way for a long time, providing locked down hardware that has really tightly integrated software - and in my opinion, a whole lot less bloatware.
Why do I say that?
Because when the iPod came out of nowhere and took over the market, there were three parts: The Mac (desktop), iTunes (the app), and the iPod (device).
Not exactly the way I remember it... iTunes was introduced for Mac OS 9, then The iPod came out later that year. Originally, the iPod only worked on Macs, it wasn't until the second generation iPod that Windows support was added (through third party software). Even then, the iPod was far from taking over the market. This didn't happen until iTunes 4 (with the iTunes Music Store) was released for Windows. This was when the rules of the game changed, and the iPod + iTunes Music Store created an entirely new market - an all-in-one ecosystem where for the first time buying, building and playing back your music library became a seamless experience.
What did it compete against? The Rio and the Creative Nomad. The Rio was over parallel port and limited to around 32MB. The Nomad devices were mostly USB1 and limited to around 256MB.
When I first tried iTunes, I used it on OS 9 with a portable CD player that could play MP3s - a great little gadget that allowed me to hold hundreds of songs on one CD. I later bought a Rio that did integrate nicely with iTunes on OS 9 (even had a custom icon in iTunes when you plugged it in). My Rio used USB 1 to connect. The slow transfer rate wasn't very noticeable because the Rio's memory modules were so small. I basically used it like a cassette player; keeping different songs on different memory modules. Still, the Rio memory was expensive and I eventually got rid of it in favor of some off-brand mp3 player that used standard flash memory and connected with USB 1.1. Although iTunes didn't recognize it, it wasn't to hard to drag & drop mp3s into it. This was the last stand alone mp3 player that I bought. To tell the truth, out of all of them, I liked the CD player the best - sure it was a little bit more bulky, but I could use those CD in just about any CD player or computer - even in my car.
The Rio had a great user interface and it was integrated with iTunes. Although the iPod promised "1000 songs in your pocked", I didn't like the fact that you couldn't upgrade the memory or change out the battery. I also avoided the Firewire interface - which was pretty much exclusive to Macs at that time
Thanks for the fun chat. I've enjoyed the trip down memory lane.
