[enjoy-your-stay]

>I'm tempted to say that this story uses hindsight to maybe give Apple at least a bit too much credit. >When the iPod first came out it wasn't anything obviously special.

Well, it kind of was. It was the only player with the click wheel interface, and the only one that supported Firewire. This gave it the advantage of being generally easy to use and was very fast and convenient to load music. It also looked pretty good (I wanted one the minute I saw it).

With the downsides being that 1. it was pretty expensive and 2. that it had an in built hard-drive that didn't really enjoy being bumped about too much (my 3rd gen died with the HDD) so you had to treat it carefully.

However they iterated pretty quickly after that, adding Windows support, USB, colour hi-res screens and massively reducing the size whilst also reducing the price. All of this allowed them to outstrip the competition so much that they were pretty soon one of the very few players left in that market.