We’ve read the news reports - the iPod and the iPod mini are unqualified product successes. Apple ran out of iPods before the end of the Christmas quarter and the release of the iPod mini in international markets has been delayed due to overwhelming domestic demand.

The iPod product line and the iTunes Music Store are the undisputed leaders in their respective markets and in conjuntion with one another are quickly changing the way people purchase and enjoy music.

Is the iPod in 2004 what the original Macintosh was to the computing world in 1984?

edited 4/7 to change topic type from “sticky” to normal
edited 4/15 to change topic type to “sticky”
edited 5/25 to change topic to normal and lock thread

The iPod is definitely a big thing.  I see them every day on my university campus.

I just went on a trip to France and one of the castles/chateau’s I visited actually had multi-lingual audio tours running on iPods, for a 10 Euro fee.  (I plan to post something on this later, with a photo. )

On the way home, there were at least three iPods on my Paris-to-San-Francisco flight (including myself.)  And I noticed a PC-user running iTunes a few rows up.

Not quite, in humble opinion.  But to put a positive spin on it, not quite..yet. The PC world had absolutely nothing like the Mac when it was introduced; it was as historic as its “1984” ad.  These days, every single MP3 player with a hard drive of 4GB and up has its sights on dethroning the iPod/mini.  So this time around, Apple’s got a pretty tough fight to make its music products “Walkman huge.”  But if it can succeed, Apple will go down in history for changing the personal music experience forever.  Here’s hoping that would also coincide with a…dare I even hope it…an increase in those fuzzy market share numbers.

I voted “Dunno, it’s too early to tell.”  Maybe my foresight is just weaker than everybody else’s!  But the Mac’s impact can’t—it seems to me—be understated.  It brought computing to everyone.  For the iPod/iTunes to have that kind of impact, I think they would need to be the impetus for a complete shift in the way people buy music, to the point where CD’s are considered archaic, and everyone gets their music online—possibly even by purchasing directly from the band.

We might get to that point, but then, we might not.  But for the iPod to be as big as the Mac, I’d argue that the iPod and iTunes have to do more than just supplement CDs and the current record label hegemony.  They need to almost totally supplant it.  And right at the moment, I think it’s too early to say which of those will turn out to be the case.

In an important way this is true.  The iPod, iTunes and TMS have changed the landscape in their industry and everyone, from Dell to Wal-Mart is rushing to copy it in one form or another.

The combination provided by Apple is a very significant breakthrough, especially since it provided the roadmap on how to integrate the music industry into this technology and how to provide the customer with a simple, effective and elegantly designed product.  Unlike other efforts, like Newton, the iPod has in fact established a greater level of success that even the Mac and is driving competitors nuts with the elegance of the design - just as MS went nuts when seeing the Mac for the first time.

Long term success is not as important as the impact on the industry when considering how innovative the iPod is.  Hopefully the long term, overwhelming success will be the primary difference between the iPod and the Mac.  There ain’t gonna be a 3% market for the iPod for a very long time.

I’ve reestablished this topic as a “sticky” and extended the length of the poll in light of Apple’s sale of 807,000 iPods in the 2nd fiscal quarter. In Q2 Apple sold more iPods than Mac CPUs.

I don’t think the iPod itself represents the revolution the original Mac did, but I think the iPod/iTunes/iTMS collection collectively represents that shift.

The iPod is certainly a big seller, but while it’s certainly well designed, it doesn’t represent the same sort of radical shift in technology that the Mac GUI did. However, the iTunes Music store is a major shift. More than anything, it has legitimized the online music download industry, and spawned plenty of copycats and online business models; some will succeed, some will fail, but the iTMS is still the gold standard to which others are measured. The iPod and iTunes are both cornerstones of this effort: without all three, none of them would be the successes they are.

The iPod is in a different league. Not any better or worse, but it stands on its own.

The Mac was iconic and just as important in its own way, but never lent its name to a genera, as the PC did.

The iPod did. It’s got pretty much to the point as iPods have become as regularly visible as mobile phones, the MP3 player to have is the iPod.

Apple have most assuredly tied up the naming to the hilt so that nobody can steal it, but in general parlance if not in advertising it has nearly *become* the referent.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this poll. It has expired and enters history. We may craft a similar poll in the future as the iPod continues to grow in popularity and 2004 enters its latter months.