Genuine question.
I know they were the scrappy startup doing different cool things. But, what are the most major innovative things that they introduced, improved or just implemented that either revolutionized, improved or spurred change?
I am aware of the possibility of both fanboys and haters just duking it out below. But there’s always that one guy who has a fkn well-formatted paragraph of gold. I await that guy.
Creative had an mp3 player that was small and had large capacity. I think they released ahead of the iPod. There were a lot of mp3 players in this space and Apple didn’t rewrite anything.
Windows media player had all of the same features as iTunes.
The Nokia n95 was a better phone than the iPhone in every comparison in 2007. If Apple did anything, they ignored how slow 2g/2.5g speeds were, and how cumbersome touchscreen keyboards were and marketed it as a better device. I think a few other companies tried this too but got out-marketed by Apple.
Windows Media Player 9 only ripped CDs to WMA files because it didn’t include a licensed mp3 encoder. It didn’t support MP3 ripping directly until WMP10 in 2004.
Prior to the first iPod, Creative’s only hard drive based portables were the Nomads, both of which were roughly the same size as a portable CD player, and heavier. Don’t get me wrong, they were cool, but they were literally twice the size of an iPod.
In '03, two years after the first iPod came along, Creative released the Zen, which was a similar physical size to the iPod. It was nowhere near as cool to use an an iPod, and was nowhere near as beautifully designed.
There were, and they all used some kind of low capacity removable storage. You can shout and holler all you like, but the fact is that Apple were the first company to make a pocketable, high capacity (for the time) music player. As with so many other of their products, they didn’t invent the market, but they refined it down to something that people would rush out to buy, or wish they could afford.
Yeah, I get where you’re coming from. The N95 was a beast of a phone. But don’t forget that Nokia had been banging out phones for 20 years by that point, they’d nailed their market and knew a thing or two. The first iPhone was Apple’s first foray into the market, and while the thing wasn’t perfect (only had GPRS/Edge, no apps, limited features, weird headphone jack) it hit the ground running and was a platform for bigger things. Apple innovated.
And yeah, touchscreen keyboards were cumbersome. On resistive screen phones. I remember using an iPod touch shortly after they came out, and was blown away by how much better the keyboard was on that beautiful capacitive screen, and how shoddy my HTC Kaiser felt by comparison.