Apple used to sell stuff that had “curated UIs”: few control, few functions, and excellent UX. I remember the cleanliness of the iPod vs the overfeatured and complicated competitors.
iPod was useless without iTunes, and I wouldn't call iTunes a curated, excellent UX. We can't only look at the beautiful light and ignore the angler fish behind it.
PS: if we include Sony's minidisk in the competion, the overall listening experience, especially the wired remote was just better. The digital walkman was still a better UX on the device side, except it has an even worse horrible PC experience and Sony barriers that made it a non starter.
The competitors were too cheap to have any feature, usually they had a big play button, a next and previous button and that's pretty much it.
The settings were usually pretty poor on those mp3 players, on mine you had a microphone mode, language, timezone, some shuffle configuration and that's pretty much it.
The iPod did look much much better and refined but in terms of simplicity, it's hard to beat the single play button of an mp3 player which doesn't know to do anything else. Those things were designed like appliance more than tech products.
I don’t think that’a true. Too many years have passed so I cannot cite makes and models, but I worked in an IT magazine back then and there were mp3 players with a lot of buttons, not unlike those overcomplicated VHS recorders which sold on “features”.
That's true, those also existed but what I've seen, they were not bought as much as the cheap kind. The ipod gave a reason to pay extra, those half way though products really did not.
Alledgedly simple UI (although I never was a Apple guy, was using iRivers at that time), but building the iPod was hard, probably entailing a flew of difficult, complex hardware and design issues to tackle.
