[em500]

During the heydays of the iPod craze, around 2005-2008, I was convinced that product line would be short lived. It was apparent that music playing was a trivial application of mobile phones, which were already becoming ubiquitous. In those days, Nokia was a far bigger cultural phenomenon outside of North America (where Nokia never gained much of a foothold). And it was truly global, not just European: even tiny villages in rural Asia, Africa and South America had Nokia vendors.

So in my straightforward projection, it was only a matter of time before the iPod would be crushed by the likes of Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Samsung, LG, etc. Never did I imagine that Apple would turn the tables on the phone manufacturers so dramatically after 2008...

[phire]

I remember in people on the internet in early 2005 wishing that Apple would make an iPod phone. Both so they could combine both devices in their pockets, and because the ipod user interface was significantly superior to every single cellphone manufacture.

The the Motorola "iTunes" phone came out in September, and everyone was like "No, I wanted an ipod with cellphone support, not a regular phone with a shitty iTunes app". It seems to only make people want an ipod phone even more.

There were lots of fake "ipod phone" design concepts over the years (and a few leaked patents) until Apple finally announced theirs.

None of the fantasy concepts predicted what we got.

[thought_alarm]

Anyone with a moderately sized music collection depended entirely on iTunes to manage their library, and were hence locked in to the iPod/iTunes eco-system. There was no reasonable alternative.

Manually copying mp3 files to a Nokia or Blackberry just didn't come close to cutting it, and any attempts by those companies to compete with iTunes on the desktop ended in miserable failure due to piss-poor software quality.

[Fnoord]

> Anyone with a moderately sized music collection depended entirely on iTunes to manage their library, and were hence locked in to the iPod/iTunes eco-system. There was no reasonable alternative.

Sorry, not true. I had a large music collection, and did not bother with iPod in the early days (and when I tried much later, didn't like scrolling wheel). It did not work with OGG Vorbis, nor could it have any moderate amount of storage. My DAP had 40 GB: iRiver H340. This was around 2003/2004.

[samplatt]

My collection at that time ('05-ish) was mp3, ogg, & flac, ~33% each. WinAMP was still king (and still is, dammit!) and could even manage my iPod Nano without needing to install itunes bloatware.

A statement like "Anyone with a moderately sized music collection depended entirely on iTunes" is ignorant to the point where I almost feel insulted.

[xmprt]

I can't be the only person who downloaded mp3s from Limewire and uploaded to my iPod. I think a lot of my friends did that too. Were the majority of iPod users already locked in by that point through the iTunes ecosystem? If so, what locked them in (the song purchases)?

[bayindirh]

I always used my iPod Nano with KDE's music player/library AmaroK. I also had a Mac at that time, and purchased a lot of albums too. Since DRM was removed at that time, I either added them to my music library or copied to my iPod via my Mac.

At the end of the day, using an iPod and iTunes neither limiting nor locking-in.

[gbrown]

And then, of course, iTunes got steadily and uniformly worse for years.

[iloveyouocean]

There were quite a few programs that synced iTunes playlists to non-Apple phones. This supports your assertion that people were dependent on iTunes for library management, but not that there was lock-in to Apple hardware. I feel that it was the seamless ease of iTunes/iPod/iPhone that won, rather than a hard moat.

[Phrodo_00]

> Anyone with a moderately sized music collection depended entirely on iTunes to manage their library

I had a fairly big collection and I didn't. Just used a folder structure and copied stuff over to my flash mp3 player (it was maybe 1GiB, maybe less).