The iPod was better than any competitor it faced ever. The UI with the click wheel was completely unmatched. Maybe the Zune, years later, came close, but Apple absolutely crushed it with the iPhone and iPod touch.
The iPhone was leaps and bounds ahead of its time, to the point that the then King of the hill, BlackBerry, didn’t even think it was possible. And the smoothness of the UI was completely unmatched. The pocketPCs of the time were clunky messes. The iPhone’s UI was so far ahead that it’s now the default UI for every phone.
And finally, the AirPods are a far superior experience than the alternatives. In addition though, the AirPods are extremely competitively priced.
AirPods are objectively great and it has taken 3 years for anything better to come out (and I would rather have seamless pairing than negligible audio quality improvements), but fashion is absolutely part of this.
The same is true of the iPod and of the iPhone. To me, that doesn’t diminish from the fact that those are/were best-in-class products, but the ubiquity is absolutely based on fashion.
The same is true of the Apple Watch. Of course the irony here is the Apple Watch was very much marketed as a fashion accessory first. That didn’t work. When the messaging pivoted to health and those capabilities got better then the completion (and there is no Android Apple Watch competition. Fitbit is the closest.), adoption spiked. But again, there is a still a very strong fashion component, even tho that isn’t a large part of the marketing anymore (the attempts to target luxury fashionistas have shifted and that has IMHO made for a better product all around). You don’t get a smart watch. You get an Apple Watch.
Apple Watch was very much marketed as a fashion accessory first. That didn’t work.
Au contraire, that was _vital_ to shifting the public discussion. Right at the beginning, public sentiment was "what? >$400 for a watch? are you crazy?" To stifle that thinking, Apple brilliantly went for the fashion accessory approach and announced the absurdly high-end Watch Edition at >$10,000 ... suddenly discussion went from "$400 is too much" to "$10,000 is absurd, but I can do $400."
Once the Overton Window for watches was shifted away from "vs $5 cheap watch" to ">$400 is reasonable", then Apple could shift the discussion to "...and look at all these other things you get besides time!"
They couldn't get to "...and health" until they got to "...reasonable price." Having achieved both, people buy an Apple Watch for all occasions, because ... well ... it's what sensible tech-connected people do.
You're giving Apple way too much credit on Apple Watch. They had no clue what they were doing with it. One of their original tentpole features was that it was the most accurate timepiece ever. They also thought that people were going to send each other heartbeats. They were clueless, in other words, other than that they knew there was something there.
I think you’re right. Especially since they just started to focus more on the health aspects of the Watch with series 4. They figured that this is apparently important to many Watch buyers, but it took them three series to truly understand this.
No, Apple wasn't "competing with Rolex" on price. Ten grand was to defuse the "OMG, $400 for a watch?" response to "well, you COULD get a stupid $10,000 version, but at $400 it's great." It also made the Rolex look lame ("it only tells time"), legitimizing getting an Apple Watch (far cheaper at that) instead.
Offering a handful of $10,000 Watch Edition probably segued into $1B in profits from associating the product line with high fashion. Nobody is ashamed to wear an Apple Watch with a 5-digit suit.
What exactly is this seamless pairing that Airpods do so much better than everyone else? I've not noticed much in the way of seams on the other wireless earbuds I've tried. Connect on device, it works, and autoconnects next time.
Have you tried using any of them with multiple devices? Not at the same time, obviously, but in scenarios like "listening to them connected to phone while on the bus, getting into your office, switching to listening to them on your laptop".
If not, I recommend you testing out this specific scenario. For a lot of the ones I tested, it becomes an exercise in patience and frustration. There were even some that refused to pair with more than one device at a time at all, meaning that every time you switch a device, you have to do the whole pairing process again. And that wasn't 10 years ago, i tested this less than 2 years ago.
And even the whole pairing process is annoying. Best case scenario, you can just pair them using the standard bluetooth settings on your phone. Worst case, you have to deal with some custom app (that you have to install on your phone) and do the steps from there (looking at you, Sony; I love your WH-1000XM over the head line of headphones, but ffs this is just bad UX). Contrast it with AirPods, where you just need to open the case and put them close to your iPhone. You do it once and then completely forget about having to do this ever again.
P.S. if your other device is an Apple one as well, it gets even more seamless. You don't need to pair it in that case, you just switch the audio output device on your macbook from speakers to airpods, which are already present on the list of audio devices (as long as you paired it with another apple device of yours first).
Bose sport has seamless nfc Bluetooth pairing and supports multiple Bluetooth connection switching with ease. Worth checking out, I enjoy my pair in the gym.
I came here looking for excuses folks spending 200 odd bucks on apple headphones tell themselves... aaaand found it! Seams!
Talking about seamless, the 3.5mm jack is far more seamless and robust to me. I wonder how long before they seal that hole on the only apple product (of the ones I use) that has it yet ... the macbook.
I've been switching between my Ubuntu laptop and Android phone. Pretty simple, I do need to disconnect it manually on one device before switching to the other but that takes a second.
I don't believe Airpods would be any better in that scenario.
A huge percentage of our species gladly trade money for, objectively speaking, very minor improvements in convenience or experience. Apple has been taking this fact to the bank for 30 years. You may not have the same preferences, but you're probably in the minority. FWIW.
I think our perception of improvement is not linear when it comes to a lot of things, one of them being the “convenience of time” and we attribute an strong preference for something objectively better even if the improvement is marginal. The “slightly sharper camera lens” or “slightly lighter bike”.
In terms of time, waiting 30 or 20 seconds for a computer to boot up won’t make much difference to most people but waiting 10 or 1 second makes a huge difference in perception.
So I can go find the ones ikeboy used some time ago, if I can find them, and the user isn’t misremembering... or I can go buy AirPods. Going AirPods on this one.
If you're using Ubuntu and Android then you're already trading less convenience for either financial or philosophical reasons. So, you're probably not the market for AirPods.
microSD is a big, big reason I'm still using Android. Before that the key factor was replaceable batteries, but all the OEMs shifted to non-replaceable sometime around 2015-16.
I've used quite a few wireless headphones/buds, and have yet to see anything as smooth as connecting a new pair of Airpods to an iPhone. The process takes about 2 seconds, and 1 second of that is you opening the lid to the charging case.
The difficulty is when headsets are paired with two devices at the same place, eg phone & laptop. In the <$80 Android wireless headset market, at least, everyone requires that you disconnect from one device and then manually connect to the other. That means power cycling the headsets or disabling Bluetooth on the device they were connected to.
I believe there are higher end non Apple devices that have solved this.
There are. Bose hardware (both the QC35II and SoundSport headset I've tried) handle this beautifully. They've also had audio sharing between multiple headsets working for years, which my partner and I have used numerous times while traveling.
I can't concur on this at all; I have a 59 dollar LG in ear Bluetooth stereo headset that easily and seamlessly auto connects to at least 3 different devices, two Android and one Apple. Multiple Bluetooth earpieces (of the single ear kind) from jawbone and Plantronics, though not nearly as cheap, have been similarly painless and this has been the case for at least 5 years, since Galaxy Note 2 days. I would never have guessed this was even a pain point that needed solving.
Much like how my Apple cables outlive everyone else’s (I still have working 30-pins), someone is going to have a good experience with BT audio and switching from one device to another. But I know other people have longevity problems with their cables, and if you didn’t know before, you know now that people have these problems with Bluetooth. I, for example, have used BT audio almost since it was a thing. I generally don’t buy cheap shit, but I’ve had the same problems others complain about across multiple devices and audio gear.
I’m glad it’s worked well for you, though. I figured someone must being a good experience with it.
My $50 funcl AI would disconnect if you touch the right earbud for a few seconds, and you could then connect on the other device. But that died a few months in.
Actually my bose have the best pairing experience I’ve had so far. I flip a switch, it tells me I can connect a new device, then I select my bose with my device. I can even have my bose connected to several devices at the same time.
My understanding is that the Airpods are not better than the high-end competition. There's plenty of $100-150 Bluetooth earbuds that have better sound quality, and a handful of sub-$100 ones that are just as good. You're paying for the name.
>The biggest downside? Their sound is just OK. AirPods produce a perfectly average sound that's clear in the mid-tones and is good for podcasts but doesn't pack much in the low end. And because of their open design, sound isolation is terrible. There's also no noise cancellation, so you'll be stuck hearing traffic or crowds around you. The Jabra Elite 65Ts produce much better sound at about the same price. Even budget alternatives like the $80 Anker Soundcore earbuds offer just-as-good sound for half the price.
I've read pretty much the same take from most reviewers I've looked at. It matches quality on cheaper models, and is outpaced by competitors in the same price range.
Audio quality is only one of the metrics for comparison, including:
- form factor (my powerbeats pro case is huge compared to airpods)
- handoff between different Apple devices
- BT reliability/connection strength (mostly down to BT 4 vs 5)
- fit and finish
- noise cancellation
People weigh all of these things differently to arrive at what is "best". If a broad range of wireless buds all meet someone's threshold for acceptable audio quality, the other factors will be deciding.
Usability is by far the biggest factor for me when it comes to AirPods.
3 years ago, they were the first seamlessly and reliably working product to free me of the cabled ear buds mess.
Were there other bluetooth ear buds before? Yes. Were they complete and utter shit to use? Also yes.
Now, 3 years later, a few competitors arise and some are better in some ways than AirPods - but again none are better than AirPods Pro. Active noise cancellation always has a markup of around $100 no matter the brand or product. So still, these AirPods Pro are fairly priced in my opinion (AirPods + $100).
You have to actively hate on Apple for even claiming any bluetooth in-ear buds are better than AirPods Pro as of today.
Samsung etc. caught on to AirPods after 3 years - but certainly not to AirPods Pro.
Audio quality may be only one metric, but it is by far the most important. When shopping for headphones/iems you first listen to them and find the ones that sound how you like, then you compare on all other factors. I think most people who buy them do so because the marketing, not due to the experience. They know the brand and know they won't suck. Not that they are the best.
I doubt anyone I know cares about audio quality better than what airpods provide. What they care about is a device that works (I.e. pairs and has long battery life). Plus it has some neat features integrated with other Apple hardware, such as being able to listen to the audio from an Apple TV.
It isn’t by far the most important. I have numerous audiophile headphones which provide a better listening experience than AirPods, but I use AirPods almost all the time because they are with me when I need them.
"The best camera is the one you have with you" is a saying among photographers, and the same goes for headphones. Apple realised this a long time ago, and they sell both.
I, and I expect many others, mostly use them walking down the road, or around the house. And mostly for voice, not music, in my case. Audio quality certainly isn’t my main priority; comfort, battery life, and reliability are all far more important.
AirPods are the only Bluetooth earbuds that don't give me instant pressure headaches. For some reason, nobody other than Apple wants to make wireless earbuds, or even semi-wired Bluetooth "sport" earbuds, that don't have some kind of conformant in-ear seal to them. In at least this sense, Apple's product is decidedly "better."
Or, one might say, Apple's product is the only satisfactory product on the market. It could certainly be better; along some axes, it's strictly worse than its competitors. But along a crucial axis, it meets a minimum standard of quality—not hurting my ears—that nothing else does. Sort of like modern VR products were "better" in that they finally met the minimum standard of quality of "not making me throw up."
(You can tell that Apple is thinking specifically about this problem when nobody else is, because when they decided to add a conformant seal to the AirPods Pro, they then spent who-knows-how-much figuring out a way to actively pump air out of the ear canal to relieve the pressure imbalance you create when you shove the 'bud in there. I haven't tried those, but I'm pretty sure, from the description of the pressure-equalization tech they employ, that they wouldn't hurt my ears either.)
OTOH, AirPods don't meet a minimum standard of quality for me, namely that of actually staying in my ears. They just kind of sit there, dangling, and fall out as soon as I turn my head. Only earbuds with an in-ear seal stay in — it just seems to be how my ears are. (I haven't tried out the Pros, however.)
With Airpods for the most part you're paying for the convenience and features. With the W1 chip they pair super fast and are really convenient to use. Sound quality is decent but something like the Sony WF1000xm3's will obviously blow them away.
Try saying WF-1000XM3 five times in a row. I have them and they sound awesome, but I can't deny that both the case and earbuds are much bulkier than AirPods, making one look "odd" when wearing them. Also the app is pretty horrible, it only sort of works 50% of the time.
Airpods dominate because when you put them in your ears, they work immediately. They also have a great case, which means you usually have them with you when you need them.
When you can buy three units for the price of one, warranty doesn't really cut it. And it's easy to find competitors with a one year warranty. The latest one I'm using is earfun, with 30 hour battery life (longer than Airpods), wireless charging for the case, and 18 month warranty.
Apple charges an extra $40 for the wireless charging case - airpods are $159, Airpods with wireless charging case are $199. Earfun earbuds are right now less than $40 total on Amazon, sold by the brand, and are better than Apple's offer at 199 as far as I'm concerned.
My iRiver H340 was ahead of its time. It supported MP3 and Ogg Vorbis and had 40 GB, while the iPods of around that time were running around with 4 GB. Oh, and iTunes DRM.
I bought an iPod Classic later on (with 160 GB) to experience the genius usability of the iPod. Except, I didn't experience it.
The major innovation of the iPhone was that it had a capacitive touch UI (which allows finger use, gestures, etc). The iPhone did not have an App Store during release. It was missing a lot of features. It was Nokia who was the market leader around that point. I wish they fully bet on Maemo and capacitive touch instead of Windows Phone (they went the right way with the N9, but the predecessors were still too much on pen and resistive touch, or hybrid).
Right now, it is oddly enough Jolla who have a partly proprietary, partly FOSS, Linux-based OS (SFOS) for which you need a paid license for. After that, they won't track you though. The iPhone would've never sustained a big pie of the smartphone market though; it is Android which killed Nokia. Official SFOS has Android emulation.
Replies like this miss the point completely. The iPod wasn't aimed at people like you who know what Ogg Vorbis is/was. It was aimed at the average, non-techy person and it absolutely crushed it.
Same with the iPhone. The major innovation of the iPhone was that it was simple to use and anyone could pick it up and use it without knowing anything about it.
> and anyone could pick it up and use it without knowing anything about it.
I wouldn't say that's accurate. Like the iPod before it, the iPhone relied on experimentation and peer demonstration for UI comprehension. It wasn't discoverable.
My single instance of using an iPhone resulted in total failure in determining how to switch between two running apps. I kept ending up on the home screen and having to click the app's icon again.
Apples clever hack around that was to let customers get hands-on with the devices before purchase in controlled Apple Store environments where they could be nudged into thinking that they had mastered the UI themselves.
>My single instance of using an iPhone resulted in total failure in determining how to switch between two running apps. I kept ending up on the home screen and having to click the app's icon again.
Except this was exactly how the original iPhone handled app-switching. It was only by getting people used to that paradigm that modern smartphones were even able to introduce mobile multi-tasking. At the time of the iPhone's release, Blackberry was king and switching apps was a matter of hitting the "Back" button over and over again until you got back to the main menu of the Blackberry OS. On some models, you could click on a scroll wheel/ball and click "Go back to App Launcher" (or something similar). Precisely what the iPhone did was give people a home button.
Except the first iPhone was not simple to use. It didn't even have 3G. You couldn't use MMS. It lacked a ton of other basic features, such as custom software. Then there was the need for jailbreaking to get some basic features back.
Ever since Web 2.0 it was clear to me that a touch-based UI would win if you used a web browser; it was Apple's capacitive touch UI which was the killer feature. Nobody had such even though Mozilla was experimenting already with a mobile browser (Fennec). (For some use-cases, a keyboard is still desirable though. E.g. a Pebble during sports is better usable than a touch-based smartwatch.)
You don't need to know what Ogg Vorbis is; I knew because I ripped my CDs to Ogg Vorbis. I already paid for these. It allowed me to save even more space compared to MP3 and AAC.
It was limited in its usage (terrible speed while 3G was widely available, limited applications while Symbian had these, could not update via repositories which my Nokia N-series could, could not even use a comm feature like MMS). Apple got away with it because of their iPod fame, and that the UI was a decent capacitive touch-based one which nobody else managed to do.
Oh yes, Nokia E71. Brilliant device (obviously, with quirks). Keyboard did break eventually; got it repaired though. Before that a friend's Nokia Communicator.
Again, nothing you've mentioned made the original iPhone complex. They were missing features. But them being missing didn't make using the phone complicated to comprehend.
I love that you keep saying I miss the point, without providing substance why I do. We clearly disagree, repeatedly, as you'd put it. What you do is, repeatedly, waving away my arguments as irrelevant, by ignoring them and saying I "miss the point". Like that is going to convince me?
FWIW, I never used the original iPhone for a long period of time, but I did use the iPod Touch, and I did have usability issues with it (not in hindsight). Something simple as blocking ads, for example, it could not do without jailbreaking. I call that a design issue. That Google does such, is to be expected as it is their main source of income. Apple? Not so much. Multitasking was also something to forget about.
Because nothing that you've offered as a counter-argument has anything to do with how simple it was to use the device. The vast majority of users, at the time the iPhone came out, didn't care about "App Stores" or ad-blocking or anything else and none of those things detracted from the simplicity of the device.
Unless you have some kind of argument that actually addresses the premise that the iPhone was successful because it was the easiest smartphone on the market to use and had high discoverability, you're going to keep missing the point by responding with features that you wish it had when it launched.
The vast majority of users of Apple products don't care about feature X, until the Apple product gets such feature. Then, suddenly, due to some magic miracle, these features do matter. We're talking about basic functionality the current devices had such as capability-based security, App Store, ad blocking, cut and paste.
The only major innovation the iPhone was using, was a capacitive touch UI. iOS wasn't polished, as it lacked many basic features. Yet the UI was good enough and simple to use. Nothing I wrote here above is in contradiction with each other. The only thing you appear to disagree on is the importance of these missing features. If they had these features from the beginning, perhaps Apple would've released too late, and the market would be saturated already (as touchscreen devices were coming to the masses regardless).
> Except the first iPhone was not simple to use. It didn't even have 3G. You couldn't use MMS. It lacked a ton of other basic features, such as custom software.
You are describing missing functionality, but you are not refuting the claim of iPhone's simplicity of use.
There were plenty of things the iPhone couldn't do. Among these that it could, the experience was years ahead of the competition.
> [...] but you are not refuting the claim of iPhone's simplicity of use.
I already addressed that in my first post in this subthread:
"[...]
The major innovation of the iPhone was that it had a capacitive touch UI (which allows finger use, gestures, etc). The iPhone did not have an App Store during release. It was missing a lot of features. It was Nokia who was the market leader around that point. I wish they fully bet on Maemo and capacitive touch instead of Windows Phone (they went the right way with the N9, but the predecessors were still too much on pen and resistive touch, or hybrid).
HTC may have had a touch UI, but they didn’t have a capacitive touch screen (did the XDA use a stylus? I’d wager it did).
More importantly, Apple was the only company willing to:
* commit all their resources to a single UI and single phone
* write their own operating system for said phone to have control over its fate and optimize for that UI
* offer a sales experience where people could discover the phone, see how it worked, and get expert help, with sales people who actually knew about the phone and weren’t offering users the choice of three dozen competitors at the same time
This "Apple is only good at marketing" idea is vastly off the mark.
Apple could put a capacitive touch screen in because they were willing to sell a phone for $600, carrier-locked on a 2-year, $40/month contract, at a time when phones sold for about 1/3 of that, and they could run a single well-optimized UI because they were somehow able to get Verizon (I think?) to agree to let a phone run a third party's UI untouched. It may not be "marketing" per se, but their success was very much business rather than technical.
In the USA it was AT&T. Other than that, agreed; it was an expensive smartphone. They've always been expensive smartphones, with ridiculous prices for storage (compare with Iriver H340 series). The cheapest iPhone was an iPod Touch.
It wasn't just "an expensive smartphone". It redefined how much the category cost. These days we shrug off a $1000 price tag so it's difficult to remember how extreme it was by the standards of the time, but "expensive smartphone"s in those days were $300 unlocked.
People don't spend $700 on a phone because they were hoodwinked by good marketing. And they certainly don't continue to spend $700 every several years because they were hoodwinked by good marketing.
People also don’t need automatic transmissions, or heated car seats, or rib eye steaks, or remodeled kitchens. But most people happily spend extra money for nice things and experiences. The world will make a lot more sense once you internalize this.
But a 1000$ iPhone is not that much better than a < $200 Motorola G , this is from some one who is considering a single port USB hub just to isolate a USB DAC from the.
The processor is way faster. And the camera is probably way better (and still not anywhere near good enough, FWIW). Maybe you just don’t care about those features?
> And the camera is probably way better (and still not anywhere near good enough, FWIW)
The camera on a $1000 iPhone is not good enough? For what? For whom? The cameras on mid range smartphones are amazing, these days. A $150 China phone or $250 West phone is great these days. It is basically adequate for a whole lot of use cases, including normal day to day usage.
The camera on the new phones are amazing, but nowhere near good enough. I think the bar for good enough is that every photo a regular person takes is an objectively great photo. People use these cameras to capture important moments in their lives. Important moments deserve great photos. Computational photography has gotten us much closer to that, but there is still a long way to go.
To capture important moments in their life, people have used worse quality in the past. The quality is going only up and up. When is good good enough? It has been good enough for me for quite a few years already (although always JPEG being compressed, so loss of details from get go).
Also, smartphones with multiple cameras are, in a way, unrealistic. There's quite some lack of realism in today's cameras, akin to autotune.
It is also not possible to take an objectively great photo. Everyone has different biases, interests, quality thresholds, etc. See e.g. [1] for a (result of a) blind test.
Your preferences != other people's preferences. Most people prefer things to be faster. And most people do not own or (if they do) carry a DSLR. Phone cameras are important.
The iRiver H340 came out in 2004, the iPod came out in 2001. Apple basically had the world's entire supply of tiny hard drives on lock for a year or two, after that other players could finally compete in that form factor (contemporary MP3 players either had little storage or were almost walkman sized).
I had a Nokia N95 when I first used an iPhone. It was clear within 5 minutes of using the iPhone that regardless of specs the iPhone was a vastly better experience. That’s how Apple defines “best” and the market has demonstrated that a huge chunk of the market agrees with them and will pay the price for it.
oof, this sort of writing is why I avoid any apple threads on hackernews. "X was better than Y" without any sort of support.
How come we have such high expectations for argument quality for every other topic other than how "apple is better" - it has reached the point where I read it and I almost jump to astroturfing conclusions. Fortunately for Apple their fans are dedicated enough to astroturf for free!
Okay here's ways in which I found the AirPods to be vastly superior to any other bluetooth headset or earbuds I've tried, including more expensive over-ear noise cancelling ones: -The H1 chip ensures a quick connection that's more stable than any other bluetooth device I've experienced. Much less pairing hassle and dropped connections and fiddling in menus. At a competitive price that already makes them superior to anything I'm aware was out for sale at the time. Add to that the tiny charging box that always keeps them topped up, and it's a winner for me. (This comment was indeed written at no cost)
Everything else you wrote is purely subjective: easier to connect? better than more expensive over ear noise cancelling headphones, really? Competitive price at $160? oof.
Yes, it's subjective. As I clearly write they're ways in which I found them to be better.
They certainly connect easier and more reliably than my over-ears, bought around the same time (flagship Sony noise cancelling ones). As for the price, as Wikipedia documents and many others have mentioned, they were priced lower than most other truly wireless earbuds when they launched. Since then the field has grown more competitive, which is good for the consumer.
You are being unreasonable. People don’t have time to analyze every point they make, and they especially don’t need to if it’s pretty much agreed to by now by everyone in tech except couple of Apple haters like yourself.
If you disagree with something call it out and let the parent comments defend it, instead of complaining how hacker news is full of fanboys. It’s what forums are for after all.
I agree with your opinion on the early iPod and iPhone, but personally I bought a pair of Bang and Olufsen wireless earpods around when the earpods gen 1 were released. I was not a big fan of the Apple design. My dad got the Apple earpods and to be honest, sound quality compared to mine was very lacking. It felt like Apple was a ripoff here.
As well any Apple main product this day in my opinion. Good and decent products, but severely overpriced. Nothing close to as revolutionary as they were in the early days. Look at functions in new models of iPhones or hardware upgrades in Macs, they are not new or exciting. These days they are so much alternatives, it's a wonder to me why Apple is still so popular. It has to be a fashion or prestige feeling in my opinion. And it's only a matter of time before that dies out in my opinion.
I agree with this. I once thought I lost my airpods, and had some gripes with them, so I bought a similar priced bluetooth headset from another brand. I wore those for 2 weeks and had many more gripes with it.
Then I found that my airpods were under the couch and I immediately switched back.
Remember itunes? UI was horrible from day one and got worse over the years until they killed it. I don't think it was ever a dealbreaker. UI is not the whole story here.
I really don’t think so. I’d say only minority is using it after streaming services became popular and you can easily do OTA updates. Not much of a reason to use it anymore, that’s why Apple even discontinued it.
Uhh... what? Apple didn't "discontinue" iTunes. It just got renamed to Apple Music. They separated out the syncing features but it's still the same product.
I do in fact use Plex. The last time I downloaded a video, I used VLC. There are plenty of ways to get movies into VLC - any cloud storage provider and its own website. The VLC app on iOS exposes a website you can use to upload movies.
iPod was a shitty player few tiers below the competition. Tiny battery life, tons of bugs, IO limitations, iTunes nonsence, original, but unergonomic ui, mechanically unsound engineering.
iRivers, Cowons, and Samsungs were a head above it without any doubt. They were just never marketed in US.
Same with Smartphones. Japanese phones had all features of a smartphone a decade before the rest of the world, but they never bothered to market them outside thinking of outside world being "not advanced enough" to culturally absorb a phone as an integral lifestyle element, and not as a work tool.
If this was true the iPhone would have made negligible inroads in the markets where those products were available. Instead it was a massive success immediately in every market where it was offered. I’m sure it had many flaws but it was enough better where it mattered to dominate the competition.
It's not a controversial opinion, it really was all marketing and polishing existing tech like the airpods. When the ipod was first revealed, even apple fanboys at the time thought it was going to be a flop given the competition used common io, didn't require proprietary software, and didn't require a proprietary OS, and also was nearly half the price.
The Reality Distiortion Field turned out to be in this guy's head :)
Seriously, many technical people underestimate the power of "bringing X to the masses" by making a beautiful, easy polished, effortless UX. UX (usually) trumps functionality.
The fashion was everything. The ipod mini with it's colors. The iconic dancing silloutte ad campaign, where the only defining characteristic is the status symbol of the all white ipod and all white headphone.
Growing up during the rise of the ipod, it absolutely was a status symbol first and foremost. Owning a zune gave you more ridicule in middle school than not owning an mp3 player at all. People were buying earpods without even buying an ipod, just to have that white cord dangling out of their ear.
Maybe older generations saw it as good tech only, but for late millenials, the ipod's popularity was due to an obsession for vanity. These were the years where everything had to be either lacoste, abercrombie, hollister, american eagle, or a 6 inch tall polo man, after all.
Part of the airpods success is that they tap into this obsession toward vanity harbored deep within millenials, who have also moved on from mall brands to gucci/balenciaga/supreme/insert bougie brand of the decade.
> Growing up during the rise of the ipod, it absolutely was a status symbol
It was a status symbol for you and your teenage friends. Life expectancy is currently around 80 in the developed world and teenagers don't really have disposable income, so teenagers weren't really driving sales. Apple made cool commercials and cool colors because they could.
The iPod was better than any competitor it faced ever. The UI with the click wheel was completely unmatched. Maybe the Zune, years later, came close, but Apple absolutely crushed it with the iPhone and iPod touch.
The iPhone was leaps and bounds ahead of its time, to the point that the then King of the hill, BlackBerry, didn’t even think it was possible. And the smoothness of the UI was completely unmatched. The pocketPCs of the time were clunky messes. The iPhone’s UI was so far ahead that it’s now the default UI for every phone.
And finally, the AirPods are a far superior experience than the alternatives. In addition though, the AirPods are extremely competitively priced.