Avatar
@iamgregb

25 years of iPod brain


It’s hard to believe that there was once a time when consumer technology solved problems we actually had.

I mentioned iPod and dedicated audio players twice recently (1 and 2), and I’m still ready to die on that hill. I genuinely believe Apple made a mistake when it gave up on the iPod and effectively handed the entire audio player market to Android and Chinese manufacturers on a silver platter. Right now, there’s basically no one else in that space.

Yes, the market might be small, limited mostly to niche enthusiasts. Yes, the margins might even be negative. But I’d gladly buy a modern iPod. Not the Touch one, the real one, with a click wheel. It was a fantastic piece of tech.

Why can't one of the most valuable companies in the world have a niche product for enthusiasts? It feels more and more like the iPod was only possible because Steve Jobs loved music and actually listened to it.

In a speech to Apple employees (quoted in Make Something Wonderful, available at https://book.stevejobsarchive.com/), Steve says:

You know, one of the reasons we started doing this [was] we could see that we were getting better and better at iPods, and we could see that there was an opportunity to maybe do the next thing—and what should it be?

And it wasn’t driven by a bunch of market research or financial spreadsheets about how big certain markets were. It wasn’t driven by that at all. It was driven by the fact that we all hated our phones. We talked to all of our friends and all the people we knew, and they all hated their phones.

Ironically, everybody seems to hate phones now too, although for very different reasons.

So maybe, just maybe, history will loop back on itself, and the next big thing will be the one we’ve already had.