for various reasons, I just landed on this page by Will Johnston, from August 17, 2004. thoughts on the ipod:
This brings up a topic for discussion that I’ve been contemplating lately. What is the ‘hype’ with the iPOD about. Some say it’s the design, some say the memory capacity and others say it’s the cachet of being seen with one. From what I understand the Sony equivalent has it beat in all of these areas. Steve Jobs is a brilliant marketeer, but I really don’t see the incredible innovation with iTunes/iPod. Where I would see great consumer value and utility is with the storage + PVR type functionality for radio/Internet. There is a lot of broadcast radio (Al Franken, NPR, Gilmour Gang…) which would be great to pre-program recording and then be able to listen when I want and skip ads. Give me that kind of functionality and I’ll buy one right away.
two things: ancient history is funny; and we still have yet to produce an ipod that’ll do what he wants without the hassle of having to plug into your computer.