On being too nostalgic: Tony Fadell mentions Amiga

[Minuous]

That article seems pretty silly, so I wouldn't give much weight to anything therein:

"His breakout success back in 2001 was the iPod, Apple's revolutionary digital media player"

Nothing revolutionary about it, there were (better) MP3 players long before then.

"Eighteen months after launch, the iPod owned the portable media player category, and for the next decade, it continued to do so."

They were quite popular with Apple fanboys, they hardly "owned" the category though.

"The iPod was one-in-a-million."

Yes, in the sense that there were a million other (better) MP3 players around...

"128GB storage, which is about the same amount of space the iPod Classic shipped with ...massive drive..."

Only 5Gb, actually...Plus 128Gb isn't massive, I didn't realize it was even possible to still buy drives that small these days.

"Using machine learning and AI to figure out context, so that the celestial jukebox knows the perfect song for every occasion."

Why would anyone want Apple to decide what songs they should be listening to!? I would think I'm much more likely to know what song I want to play than some AI.

"music in the cloud."

So to listen to a song 50 times means you have to download it 50 times...that's hardly efficient.

[Minuous]

>Heard about cache? It means it's accessible from anywhere you have a connection. Doesn't mean you have to download it each time. Hence the storage he was talking about.

I don't understand what you mean by this. The data it is either on the device or not. If you don't have to download it, it's being stored somewhere on the device, so not cloud-based. In which case why would you still need an Internet connection?

>Then I suggess you open your eyes: very few MP3 players have 128Gb today... Most mp3 players (those that are "better" than iPods got as little as 8/16Gb), and the only HD-based ones come with 128Gb only.

But if you read the article where it claims it is a "massive drive", it is talking about the latest iPhone 6. 128Gb is plenty for a dedicated MP3 player but not for a machine that tries to be taken seriously as a proper computer. They really are just toys not just in terms of being locked down but also in terms of specification. My low-end netbook that is years old and cost only a small fraction of the price of an iPhone has nearly triple this much storage.

More generally, Apple's dismissiveness of retrocomputing serves a convenient excuse for their atrocious lack of backwards compatibility, early abandonment of products and forced upgrades.

[Minuous]

>when you buy songs on iTunes you don't have to sync them to your iPod

I think you mean "if" not "when". (Why buy songs there, that seems a very expensive way to do it when they are freely downloadable elsewhere...) The part about syncing effectively means, basically, that it doesn't actually give you the file (ie. download it to your device) until you play it. You just have, effectively, the right to download it. Which means that you would have to make sure you have an Internet connection available when you play it (as well as when you bought it), and would also have to wait for it to download before you could play it. That doesn't seem advantageous.

>You get a cheaper and more rugged device and when you buy songs on iTunes you don't have to sync them to your iPod. Walking around with a magnetic hard disk that will die if you shake it too much or some immensely expensive flash based device that you have to manually sync with a PC, is just not attractive to modern users.

iPhones are about the least rugged devices out there, a drop of approximately one foot is sufficient to break the screen and render it unusable. That seems to be the most likely point of failure, the ruggedness of the storage is secondary.

>And guess what? If you connect to a friend's computer, you can still listen to your music by connecting to the cloud... even though he doesn't have a copy of your music.

If you have all your files on your device there is no need to use the cloud. You could copy all the songs from your device to your friend's device, and vice versa, faster than downloading them all from a cloud account (not to mention data caps). Cloud-based storage might be useful for backing up unimportant files to, but another hard disk would generally be better for various reasons (cost, speed, security, etc.).