This is anecdotal, but maybe it'll explain a bit more where I was coming from in regards to my reaction to the initial ipod reveal.
Back then, my music player adaption went from CD Player, CD Player with MP3 CD support, to Nomad Jukebox 3.
Size was not an issue at the time, since I was used to the CD player size and was more looking for ways to get rid of all the CDs I had to keep bringing with me. The Jukebox 3 had the largest HDD at the time, as far as I recall, and allowed me to put my full CD collection on it at that time already. It was also running on a larger battery brick and had an additional slot for another battery to extend its playtime. The batteries were charged in an external charger, so that you could simply swap out the batteries and keep on taking the player with you. It also came with a remote control, which was more of a gimmick, but came in handy every once in a while. The UI allowed browsing through a scroll wheel on its side and you could access the music through various ways (as far as I recall: genre, artist, album, song, and playlist).
Especially the scroll wheel was so easy to use compared to the click wheel on the ipod, which appeared to be more gimmicky than useful at the time.
Of course, by now things have changed and I love the fact that I can put all that music on my phone and being able to connect it to all the different devices (bluetooth & audio jack speakers/headphones), so that I wouldn't want to take a dedicated MP3 player, especially the size of the Jukebox 3, with me anymore.
However, at the time of the original ipod release the lack of HDD size in favour of hardware size didn't make any sense to me and I still catch myself thinking like that during some of the Apple release events since, where it sometimes seems like they're taking one step forward and multiple steps back - will be interesting to see what happens during the upcoming Macbook event.
I'm sorry, I must remember it wrong then. I recall that I had the option to buy either of them at the time and that I had to place a preorder for the Jukebox 3, which kept on getting delayed for quite a while. Also, this was not in NA, but a quick search for the original ipod release date in that country didn't yield any results, so I'm not sure if I'm just remembering it wrong and that there was quite a bit of time in between, or if it actually did become available at a later time in that country.
Of course, by now things have changed and I love the fact that I can put all that music on my phone and being able to connect it to all the different devices (bluetooth & audio jack speakers/headphones), so that I wouldn't want to take a dedicated MP3 player, especially the size of the Jukebox 3, with me anymore.
However, at the time of the original ipod release the lack of HDD size in favour of hardware size didn't make any sense to me and I still catch myself thinking like that during some of the Apple release events since, where it sometimes seems like they're taking one step forward and multiple steps back - will be interesting to see what happens during the upcoming Macbook event.