it's interesting to see the history of iPods and realizing how folks behind portable media players found different solutions for, well, portable media.
for those who don't know, flash storage was agonizingly expensive back in the 1990s and the 2000s. if you wanted to listen to music on the go, you either had to use a portable cassette/CD/minidisc (remember those?) player, or splurge on those mp3 players that had those massive mechanical (spinning) hard drives in them. i honestly haven't gotten my hands on one of those from back in the day, but i'm assuming they have actual desktop hard drives in those things?? which is mindblowing to me.
if you absolutely really wanted an mp3 player with flash storage, well get ready to torture your wallet for one that has 64 MB of storage...laughable by today's standards, i know. the reason flash storage had more appeal to some, though, was that if you had a cheap portable CD player (aka a non-sony CD player) for instance, the tracks would constantly skip in the slightest movement. those things were THAT sensitive. not to mention how fragile cassette tapes are. the moment you snap the tape, it's over basically.
then the iPod happened back in christmas 2001. compared to the mp3 players that used spinning hard drives back in the day, the first ever iPod was MINISCULE (even though in today's standards it looks like a brick you could use as an expensive self-defense weapon).
but this isn't the only shocking (to me) thing from apple. back in 2005, the iPod mini came out, and these things had those miniscule little hard drives named MicroDrive in them. these were actual mechanical hard drives that ranged from 256 MB (if i'm not mistaken) to 8 GB of storage. and those things are TINY!! how the hell did they sit down one day and think "okay folks so i have this cool idea of making a spinning drive for Barbie dolls, whaddya think??"
= infodump over, thanks for reading <3 =