Tedium - Shuffled By the iPod 🔀

Today in Tedium: Some say it was overdue, some lament that it remains a missed opportunity, but the truth of the matter is, the iPod has left us, after years of neglect. The final iPod Touch was released in 2019, four years after the previous model, and essentially as a legacy model for a niche audience of people who don’t want modems in their phone-like devices—think hackers and the parents of young children. It was not what it was upon the device’s general release. But I want to take a step back with today’s Tedium to consider the many, many competitors to the digital music throne that Apple’s legacy device vanquished. There were many. And as the latest entry in my series of obscure things that “didn’t make it” or fell into modern-day obscurity, I’m covering 10. — Ernie @ Tedium

Lazy Game Reviews did a review of this device a few years back.

3. Audible MobilePlayer

Device type: A pre-MP3 audio player, focused on audiobooks

Era: Late-1990s

These days, Audible is a fundamental part of Amazon’s book empire, but it actually launched what was arguably the first successful digital audio player, albeit on a smaller scale, by focusing on an area of the market that wouldn’t upset the music industry—audiobooks.

The $200 audio player, which was a major part of the original Audible model, likely proved not only the value of digital audio players in general, but created a path forward for text-based audio formats. That would prove an important market years later, to Audible’s great benefit. (That said, selling 3,000 units in a year might seem like small potatoes today, but those 3,000 people were all spending $20 a month on content, on average, so not nothing!)

The fast-moving digital audio player space, mixed with market volatility and corporate challenges (the company’s CEO died in 1999, a notable setback) eventually led Audible to get out of he hardware market. After a second, cheaper, attempt called Otis in 2001, the company basically ceded the market to companies like Apple. (No problem—the players were really a way to sell folks on the audiobooks anyway.)

6. Archos Jukebox Series

Device type: A line of early MP3 and video players

Era: Early 2000s

If Apple sold a device that could fit a thousand songs in your pocket, Archos sold Swiss Army knives in comparison, with an array of devices that, while not exactly elegant, got to many of the innovations of the iPod years before Apple.

It started with the Jukebox 6000, a hard drive-based audio player that beat the iPod to market by about a year. The French company moved fast and within just a few years had developed players with built-in video playback on small screens, and later big ones. These were not cheap devices—the Archos Video AV320, which had a full-screen video player, cost $570 upon release—and that gave competitors an opening to eventually undercut it.

I admit there was a time I looked longingly at the Archos devices in flyers for Best Buy and other tech stores, in part because it offered a lot of functionality that it took the iPhone years to get. Why did this lose? The simple answer likely has a lot to do with the fact that the company never had any of Apple’s style and design—the rubber bumpers on some of the jukebox models stood out like a sore thumb, as did the Jukebox 6000’s design which was clearly built to account for AA batteries. We expect our music players to be as stylish as they are functional.

(One notable point about the Archos line is that it supports Rockbox, the same alternative operating system that the early iPod models did.)

9. SanDisk slotMusic Player

Device type: A line of post-iPod MP3 players, complete with semi-proprietary format

Era: Late 2000s

SanDisk is by no means a market failure on the MP3 player sales front, and even still sells the devices today. Unlike Creative, the company took a more barebones approach to its players and ultimately found success with that.

But it tried a weird experiment in the late 2000s that is worth noting in a list like this. Simply put, the company attempted to sell albums in a microSD format—a format that the company was instrumental in helping to bring to market as one of the primary developers of modern flash memory.

The strategy, called slotMusic, was ultimately short-lived, but seemed to be something of a bridge format for people who weren’t quite ready for computers. At least that’s how CNET put it: “The aim behind SanDisk’s idea is to ease the transition from CD to MP3 for those who have been hesitant to go digital.”

(The format itself was not particularly DRM-laden, which was nice—you were essentially buying albums in a raw MP3 format.)

The result is that Sandisk made perhaps the last distinct physical format for music-based media, and did so well into the iPod revolution. (It even followed up the idea with a questionable decision to make something called slotRadio, which essentially prepackaged a thousand DRM-laden songs onto an MP3 player. That thing’s fatal flaw? No back button.)

Check out the video above, from Techmoan, to learn more about this odd format.