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.
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.