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Touching the back wall of the Apple store

(blog.lauramichet.com)
252 points nivethan | 1 comments | 27 Jun 25 02:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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userbinator ◴[30 Jun 25 04:26 UTC] No.44419366[source]▶
The MP3 player I had before that iPod was a much more generic one. I've spent the last few days occasionally checking Wikipedia and other places online to see if I can tell which one it was, and I have absolutely no idea.

Might've been an S1, which arguably was better than Apple's products in many ways, and likely sold a lot more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S1_MP3_player

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1. mystifyingpoi ◴[30 Jun 25 06:14 UTC] No.44420000[source]▶
Oh, good memories. Everyone had one of these at school! I think I had a 64 MB version. It was peak commodity tech at the time.

I remember getting a Creative Zen a few years later, and it was the first time when I realized how everything turns into crap with the technology advancement. No batteries, so needed USB charger to travel (USB chargers weren't even too popular back then). No mass storage support, only sync through Windows-only software, MTP was unusable on Linux, didn't work with cars or boomboxes. Video playback required converting to very specific formats, which the provided software often failed to do, needed custom codec packs. Absolutely required MP3 ID tags to even show the song in the playlist. Cool idea for a player, but the software was pure garbage. I think I broke it once and used the old player for years more.