Someone on another message board, during a discussion, linked to this old thread on the Mac Rumors website to make a point. You can probably guess the point once you take a look at the thread.
Having no idea what the point was, at first, or what was in the link, I read it. And I laughed SO hard.
Any other good examples out there, on or offline?
Perhaps it’s too early with too little sleep and a non-existent relationship with Apple products, but I have absolutely no idea what it is I’m looking at for humor in a thread of folks talking about the price of an ipod in 2001.
Some quotes from the other thread from 2001 about the iPod’s original announcement:
Of course these were all the same people who probably stood in line for hours if not days to get their “Cube 2.0”.
I found it interesting and slightly funny, for a number of reasons - no idea if they’re the *same *reasons the OP did:
-The “WOW! 5 Gigs!” thing just seems quaint and silly, as does much of the thread, but it’s only from 2001.
-The people saying it would never take off were just a bit wrong, really.
-The masturbatory AppleFanBoyism in a small number of posts.
-The simple plain stupid naivety of some posts “OMG you can store FILES on it!”. What?!?!
My favorite:
“…if he thinks for one second that this thing is gonna take off.”
That’s right up there with “Nobody’ll need more than 64K…”
I’m not going to link to the thread, nor even look for it, but a year or so ago I found a thread dated 9/11/2001. It was about breaking news about a plane that hit a building in NYC. It followed the news story throughout the day, with the horror growing moment by moment. One poster replied to another in a most inflamatory way: “How DARE you even THINK that this administration will use these events for their own political purposes?!?”
Hilarious and sad.
Yeah, but it’s not a breakthrough digital device. It’s a popular and well-marketed media player.
I don’t really see much in the way of hilarious hindsight in that thread, it’s just about spot-on, except that everyone seems to have overlooked that old H. L. Mencken attribution.
Yeah, it turned out to be a very popular appliance. That’s pretty counter-intuitive.
(I received an iPod as a gift, and re-gifted it within a pretty short period of time. It’s just like any other .mp3 player, except it’s a complete pain in the ass. Oh, and it’s a bit shinier, and overpriced. Fttt.)
I think the point here was that it installed on a Mac as a removable storage device, so you could store arbitrary files on it, making it a portable hard drive as well as a music device, something the the Nomads and Rios of the day couldn’t do.
And it wasn’t a revolutionary device through and through – but it was revolutionary enough in the right places that it was still game-changing.
The real success though came when they finally made it compatible with Windows.
Surely it wasn’t the first one to do this though, was it? Have we really come that far since 2001?
It was the first hard-drive based MP3 player to do it and was also the first firewire-based MP3 player. There may have been some cheap little 64MB or 128MB flash-based players that could do it over slow USB 1.1 connections, but it was a pretty small amount of space to work with.
7 years is several lifetimes in the tech industry these days.
Sometimes I think that 2001 was quite recent. And then I remember how in 2001 I was on dial-up and had a 20GB hard drive. Technology has improved so much and so rapidly that it’s hard to comprehend how and when it all happened. And no matter how good it gets, we still complain about it and wish it was better.