Seriously, those MP3 players were nothing like the iPod. This is a bit like people going on about smart phones before iPhone. I had a couple of those and the iPhone was just so far ahead, that we are not really talking about the same category of products.
A product isn’t merely checking some boxes. Checking the “has hard drive” box doesn’t make any it an iPod.
In the context of the time, those mp3 players were following in the footsteps of portable CD players or walkmen, which were themselves bulky and about 70-90 minutes of music before changing media. There were also a few low capacity compact flash based players borrowing media from the growing digital camera market, and later on some CD players that would play yellow book CDs with mp3 files
"So far ahead" in some ways, while completely lacking in others.
When iPhone came out, the responsive UI was something I'd wanted for the past several years worth of Palm and HTC phones. But I couldn't get one because I'd have to give up things I used daily - like 3rd party apps, 3G data, turn-by-turn navigation, MMS (which was still a big deal before the prevalence of IP-based mobile IM platforms), multitasking, live streaming radio, and even "crazy" features like copy/paste and custom wallpapers/alert sounds.
iPhone did a few things very well, but it took a while to catch up on a lot of the common functionality of those older smartphones. Thankfully Apple did add those features over time. And other smartphones gained more responsive UI. Now we have more options than ever, with even the cheapest bargain device performing better than anything available in 2007.
Yeah I also didn't know that "hard drive based audio players" was a thing :)
But I remember that ipod was awesome (comparing with the other players with shitty controls and sticky buttons). I hated apple products at the time (religion) but I was amazed by the quality and UI of ipod and the quality of ipad (took me and my kids many attempts and years to actually kill it).
I don't think any other product amazed me that much since then.
The first "box" I used to check when buying things like that is that PC sees it as a hard drive to which I can copy files. That horror they called iTunes would not be let anywhere close to my computers.
A product isn’t merely checking some boxes. Checking the “has hard drive” box doesn’t make any it an iPod.