Wayback Machines Are Teh Funny
Nothing makes future people feel more smug than making fun of past people. It's so easy, even a caveman can do it!
Since the iPhone was announced, I thought this link sent to me by a reader who wishes to remain anonymous might be a little apropos. (Why does everyone wish to remain anonymous btw? This site's gonna be big one day, and you're going to wish you'd remained nonymous.)
From October 23, 2001:
Apple introduces iPod, a digital audio player (MP3, MP2, more) with a 5GB hard drive (1000 songs). 20 minute skip protection. FireWire-equipped, first such music player. 10 hour battery, lithium-polymar ("most advanced battery; more advanced than laptop batteries"), takes 1 hour to charge. Size of a deck of cards: 2.4" wide, 4" tall, 3/4" thick.
The comments are great, and give us a glimpse into the success-predicting abilities of your average internet mob:
- "Great just what the world needs, another freaking MP3 player. Go Steve! Where's the Newton?!"
- "hey - heres an idea Apple - rather than enter the world of gimmicks and toys, why dont you spend a little more time sorting out your pathetically expensive and crap server line up? or are you really aiming to become a glorified consumer gimmicks firm?" [AN: This comment really did predict the future!]
- "I still can't believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! Who cares about an MP3 player? I want something new! I want them to think differently! Why oh why would they do this?! It's so wrong! It's so stupid!"
- "gee! an mp3 player with a HD! how original! kinda reminds me of a JUKEBOX i once knew.."
- And myfavorite: "All that hype for an MP3 player? Break-thru digital device? The Reality Distiortion Field™ is starting to warp Steve's mind if he thinks for one second that this thing is gonna take off."
(And yes, it's still "lame post week." Sorry.)
January 15th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
I’d love to be able to track down all the initial naysayers and find out how many of them now own iPods.
Still haven’t managed to pick up one for myself… I’m waiting until they put out a terabyte version with global Wi-Fi and a Sirrus/XM satellite receiver…
January 15th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
Never underestimate the ability for any human to instantly shove their foot entirely into their mouth. Some people spend their entire lives deriding ideas as stupid, insulting everyone, and being pessimistic every hour of every day. These are the people that lack good ideas, and that is why they are how they are.
Jealousy is typically what it all boils down to, just in this case they couldn’t have been MORE wrong.
January 15th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
In all fairness, it’s not too hard to see why yet-another-mp3-player would at first blush be seen as underwhelming. I wonder how surprised Apple was that it caught on so well.
When the Newton was released, Apple was sure it had a winner on its hands. I also remember the Lisa being hailed as the next great thing in computing, and hell if I hadn’t been a starving high school student I would have bought one myself.
Apple has had its fair share of misses, and the iPod might have been one of them if they’d have released it at just about any other time than they did. But I also think Apple has a pretty good tap into the consumer pulse and are likely to make fewer mistakes than Microsoft or Sony or the other big consumer electronics companies. The iPhone is an example of this. Why did it take Apple to implement so basic as being able to scroll through your voicemail messages? There is nothing revolutionary about the iPhone except that Apple just went and made a phone with features that people have been wanting for years. Nokia and friends are slapping their collective foreheads over that feature alone.
January 15th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
To be honest, it didn’t take Apple.. it took Apple and Cingular together. Other phones don’t support scrolling through voicemail because the voicemail systems don’t support it. Cingular (now AT&T Wireless) worked with them to implement a new voicemail system that supports the functions Apple wanted the phone to have.
In recent years, US Telcom companies have been trying to move away from proprietary phone support and toward a more generic standard that “all phones” would support. This is actually a step backward to some degree unless Cingular opens up the protocols for the new back end software to the other phone makers. Of course, once they do that, they’ll be revealing to competitors how they did it, and Verizon, Sprint and the rest will reverse engineer it.
January 15th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Agreed with moxcamel, except for the timing claim. Apple created the mp3 player mass market with the iPod. Had it come later, I probably would have eventually bought a “Rio” in the mean time but no player except one as good as the iPod could have brought the mass market to portable mp3.
(Mea culpa: I wasn’t on that macrumors thread, but I was among the underwhelmed people that day. Hey, at least we were aware of the damn iPod in the first year of its existence, unlike practically everyone else!)
January 15th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
As they say, hindsight is 20/20. It’s funny to point and laugh at the naysayers now, but most of the time there’s good reasons to naysay. Particularly in the case of Apple, where they maintain so much secrecy about the product to whip up the frenzy. When you’re expecting a handheld computer to revolutionize the industry, hearing about a simple music player is disappointing.
In the game side of things, you see this all the time. How many people said the fantasy genre for online RPGs was oversaturated? Then WoW comes along and breaks all existing records with a fantasy game. Even today people are naysaying Blizzard (including me), but they just announced they have 2 million North American subscribers. I remember when people said the total market for online games was, at absolute maximum, 1 million subscribers. Whoops.
Of course, then something like Dark and Light comes out to encourage the naysayers.
What’s worse than the naysayers being wrong? The dumbasses that come along afterwards and try to sound smart about why the product did well. “Apple offered users a quality product!” Is that why the user couldn’t change the battery in the original model, and why so many screens cracked in the past? “Blizzard listened to the customers!” So, that’s why we have the neverending “raiders vs. casuals” debates everywhere? (The reality in both of these cases has to do a lot more with business and marketing than actual product quality, really.)
January 16th, 2007 at 12:16 am
Hindsight is 20/20, but vehement rage is in the NOW!
Oh I was going to so nail you if you hadn’t italicized that title!
Speaking for myself, I bought an iPod and didn’t even look at the competition. That makes me a tool of the man, I know. OTOH, I haven’t regretted the purchase, and the combination of iTunes and my iPod do exactly what I want them to do.
January 16th, 2007 at 3:05 am
I think I got my first MP3 player back in about ‘99 when 32Mb storage was about as large as you could get. Still don’t own an iPod - could never understand what the fuss was about.
January 17th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Keep in mind the people posting on forums are not the target audience for apple products (at least not anymore). The ipod was targetted at people who didn’t know what mp3s were, didn’t know how to download them, and didn’t know there were already tons of mp3 players. Of course to people who had been downloading mp3s for years and already owned portable mp3 players, the ipod would sound like a stinker.
Just like now people are saying the iphone blows. They are right, it does blow. Its more expensive and less capable than the other smartphones that will be coming out at the same time. But that has absolutely nothing to do with wether or not it will succeed in the market.
January 17th, 2007 at 6:52 pm
I’m as soooooo getting an iPhone
/drool