[jonnathanson]

"If you inserted a CD, iTunes instantly offered to rip it for you, fully automatically."

You're correct. I think my memory of product timelines in the early days is a bit hazy.

Even still, I'd love to see data that ripping from CD was a prevalent use case at all in the early days. I believe it was originally intended as an onboarding process / ecosystem-lock mechanism. The assumption: a lot of consumers (at the time) have CD libraries; by allowing them to easily port over to iTunes, we can port their libraries onto our ecosystem; from there, we have them. That was clearly the idea...but I'd love to learn more about how common a use case this ended up being.