Comment by paxys

24 days ago

In hindsight it is crazy that tiny iPods from the early-mid 00s had 120-160 GB storage, more than what a flagship $1000 iPhone starts with twenty years later. Yes they used HDDs, but for media consumption it didn't really matter. And then when Apple switched to flash storage we took a massive step back to 1/2/4 GB with outrageous premiums for extra capacity.

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paxys

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r3trohack3r  24 days ago

I remember reading articles at the time running the numbers on what it would cost to legally fill an OG iPod with mp3s at $0.99 a song or $9.99 an album. My memory is fuzzy but I remember it being something like $15,000 to fill an iPod legally with music from iTunes. Many articles concluded that the device was speced for piracy.

I don’t think the storage size was reduced for technical reasons. I suspect a lot of back and forth with the music industry happened to constrain the device to a “practical” size for legally licensed music.

  • TheKarateKid  18 days ago

    The music industry is 100% invested in streaming music services, so they don't care if Apple offered high-capacity iPhones cheaply.

    Rather, it's Apple who has intentionally been keeping storage capacity low for 2 reasons:

    1.) Push users to use iCloud storage, which isn't cheap and purposely doesn't even offer storage tiers that match their phone capacities.

    2.) It provides incentive for users to upgrade, especially in an era where keeping an iPhone for 3-5 years has become common and new models offer very little from older ones.

  • Ntrails  23 days ago

    I think my parents owned order magnitude 500 cds. Something like 150mb per album in mp3 format gets you to, what, ~75gig?

    I doubt they were outliers? Nobody I know filled their players with itunes bought music, almost everyone was importing from physical back catalogues. I will concede that we did subsequently share our collections somewhat though...