I disagree. Apple had no monopoly on 1.8" hard drives nor most of the other components in the original iPod (except maybe the scroll wheel itself?); they were merely among the first to apply it into a media player. It was the UI that was groundbreaking. You could switch from an album, to and artist, to a playlist, to a specific song all within seconds with your thumb. CD-based mp3 players were ok, but were battery hogs and updating playlists/music/etc was a hassle as one had to burn CDs. The UIs for most were "useable" at best.
Apple did have clever, original, and good marketing, but the product (iPod) was so clearly better than anything that came before it, either way. And that was my original point against the prior comment that the customer experience was just "be like Steve Jobs" and then it's good.
The first Apple iPods only had FireWire which was exotic here, so they were not at all popular. I had a Rio (Nitrus, I think?) that was released within a year from iPod's release. When I first interacted with an iPod a couple of years later, I was not at all impressed.
I didn't have a NOMAD, but Slashdot's "no wireless, less space than a NOMAD, lame" tagline was pretty much on point. Its marketing was great, however.
"No wireless, less space than a nomad, but can be fully synced up and fast-charged in a few minutes" is what the review should have been. USB support came after when usb2 was "good enough". Syncing and creating playlists with other players was usually awful, slow, and the bundled software was not much better. iTunes was (at least at the time before the iTunes Store) quite lean and mean, too.
I'm not saying the iPod was perfect, though later versions got pretty close. But the "no wireless" part of the review still makes me chuckle. There were few hand-held anything that leveraged it at any truly useful level until proper smartphones existed.
Apple did have clever, original, and good marketing, but the product (iPod) was so clearly better than anything that came before it, either way. And that was my original point against the prior comment that the customer experience was just "be like Steve Jobs" and then it's good.