You picked a bad example. The iPod was very innovative (first time you could have all your music with you on the go – instead of having to decide on a tiny selection before you leave home and slowly upload it to your player).
But yeah, that was decades ago. And with Jobs, innovation has left.
The first iPod had 5 GB of storage, less than e.g. the Creative Nomad Jukebox which had 6 GB. If you were around at the time you may remember the (in)famous verdict of CmdrTaco [1]:
. No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
So no, the fruit factory did not produce the first device which could haul your entire music collection. What they did is what has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread: they took an existing product - digital high-storage portable music player - and put it in a sleek package with an equally sleek user interface - click wheel etc. Then they marketed the hell out of it to their loyal followers, portraying it as the thing to be used by all the right people. They also locked the thing tight into their own 'ecosystem' so that you could not just hook it up to any old computer and dump music on it like you could do with most other devices in this category except for Sony's - which is not that strange given that the fruit factory seems to have taken quite a few clues from Sony elsewhere.
Your statement is in itself a testament to their success in marketing and something which can be seen in many places: someone develops a product, the product gets some traction on the market, people seem to like the concept. Other companies also start making similar products which also gain some traction but it remains just that, a new product in a sea of many such. Then along comes the fruit factory which takes the product, wraps it in its trademark Dieter Rams-inspired shape, puts a large fruit stamp on it and markets it to the bone to their loyal audience. Pretty soon that audience will claim that the product was 'invented' by the fruit factory, that it is 'insanely great', that nobody has done something like this before and if they did they copied it from the fruit factory, etc.
That’s a really cool link! One guy predicted it very well:
> Second, I think Apple is using this as a "sneaky" device to sneak large capacity hard drives into our pockets. Basically, once we're used to carrying around something like this, they can build on it. Add the PalmOS or OSX/CE (OK, bad joke, but you get the idea) and you have a PDA with more massive storage than any other. Add a firewire connection to some optics and you have a video camera with 10 hours of battery life, smaller and easier to conceal than Sony's smallest.
The thing I like about the video camera idea is that with tapeless storage, editing is much, much faster, and with the disk unit in your pocket, the camera can be really tiny and lightweight and still have a lot of features. Basically, once they up the drive capacity to 20GB (maybe 3-6 months?), that's enough for 90 minutes of broadcast quality digital video, enough for almost any common event!
Think about it. This is just an iSeed iPod. Many other things can and probably will grow out of it.
Against using Nomad a strong counterexample: they were almost certainly developing the device before the Nomad came out, so they might have been innovative in the sense that they were working on a device that they hadn’t seen before.
In my recollection, though, a bigger hard drive did not really feel like an innovation. It might have just been that I was a kid, but my music library was not so huge, and it was possible to reduce the file sizes anyway (especially given how crappy ear buds were at the time, and anyway, how good was the dac in a cheap mp3 player at the time?).
We were used to the idea that hard drive sizes might make a big jump anyway, it was still the era of dramatic leaps and bounds.
Finally, you probably had a binder full of CDs anyway (burned CDs if you were cool of course), so you could play them in a car. So, the concept of having much more “drive space” in some sense was not at all new. (And the UI of a binder full of CDs is much more intuitive than any MP3 player!).
Rather, the iPod didn’t really have any big new ideas. It’s just that nothing about it sucked. The hard drive was pretty big, the UI was good enough, the clickey wheel thing was fun, the audio quality was fine. No new ideas, B+ all around, and nothing to make you want to given up on it.
Fair points about intense marketing and less successful products being forgotten in history. However, I wasn't able to find anything about the first (6 GB) Nomad Jukebox on Wikipedia. The iPod was released in October 2001, I only see mentions of the Jukebox later than that.
What does the "no wireless" complaint refer to? I don't see any mention of wireless connections for any of the Nomad Jukeboxes either.
Besides the point: I personally find the Nomad Jukebox and other MP3 players from the era extremely ugly, while the iPod looks beautiful and has become an icon (yes, Rams-inspired, but that's not a bad thing). I say this as a decidedly non-Apple-fanboy, but as an industrial designer.
The Karma looks interesting – not ugly, not pretty, but kinda unique.
I had a Rio 500 [1], which I wouldn't call ugly, but certainly not beautiful and it felt like a cheaply made plastic box, even though it was expensive (64 MB flash!).
I suspect he was referring to 802.11b WiFi when he said the thing has no 'wireless' option, not the lack of a radio receiver. 802.11b (and 802.11a) were launched in 1999 and as such predate these high-capacity digital music players. 802.11b was not fast by modern standards (raw data rate up to 11 Mbit/s, practical throughput ~5.9Mbit/s for TCP, ~7.1 Mbit/s UDP) so it would have taken a while to dump a large collection to these devices.
But yeah, that was decades ago. And with Jobs, innovation has left.