Re: At the time, most PCs did not yet have USB 2
STILL rewriting history,
not so.
The early iPods used Firewire and USB2.0 didn't really exist on ANY PC.
Err... no. Many PCs didn't ship with FireWire or USB 2, but some did, notably units from Sony and the more expensive Dells and HPs. In addition, there were PCI cards which had USB 2 and/or FireWire ports on them. I know this because I had such cards installed on my WinBoxen. I had, on older systems, USB 1, then USB 2, and/or FireWire 400 then FireWire 800 cards. By 2002 I had combo cards which had USB 2 and FireWire 400 ports. This would be around six months after the first iPods arrived. Before that, I had stand-alone FireWire 400 cards. I could have attached an iPod to a WinBox if I had so desired, which I didn't. I used FireWire on the WinBoxen for the same reasons I used FireWIre on Macs: high speed hard drives and high-end scanners.
Using iPod with Win98 was a nightmare install originally.
Not really, but YMMV.
" I repaired my iRiver by giving it a hard disk from a dead iPod"
Certainly Apple implemented some sort of DRM, so an Apple HDD couldn't be used in say an Aspire One (both use the ZIF interface).
And Apple's DRM was designed from the start to screw with the record industry. You could set up tracks as 'playlists' and then burn the playlists to CD; the system allowed you to burn them up to seven times. However, one thing that the record company execs didn't notice was that Steve Jobs hated, hated, HATED DRM, and there was a back door: if you ripped the playlist off the CD which you had just created, then you now had it on the computer or on the iPod without any DRM whatsoever. It was perfectly possible to have your entire music collection be DRM-free, you just had to have got the original tracks in high res and re-ripped them in max res. It took time, but you could just set iTunes to do it and go about your business. It was almost as if iTunes had been deliberately designed to circumvent DRM, but Steve would never do that to his 'partners', now would he?
I've no idea which revision of HDD you used.
Doesn't matter.
There was nothing innovative or clever or cheap at all about the iPod.
You keep saying this. You keep not being able to support it.
It was the iTunes and marketing that made it a success.
that certainly helped. Hmm. Perhaps iTunes might have been considered to be, oh, innovative?
Anything else is Apple propaganda. It wasn't the only player to use an HDD to get round the high cost of flash (then).
You hate Apple. We know.
DRM is what killed the Sony Net MD, and lack of any legitimate online source for content hampered all non-Apple players,
Ah, so iTunes was an important innovation...
not everyone was using illegal MP3 downloads,
didn't have any of those for a long time. I used iTunes well before I got an iPod. Hell, I never actually got an iPod, I just dumped stuff to my iPhone. I'd been using iTunes for years before that.
nor did many people know (at the start) how to rip Tape, Cassette, vinyl and CD to MP3.
iTunes made it trivial. Hmm. I guess that there was some innovation after all...