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0 pointsfainpul3mo ago0 comments

Fair points about intense marketing and less successful products being forgotten in history. However, I wasn't able to find anything about the first (6 GB) Nomad Jukebox on Wikipedia. The iPod was released in October 2001, I only see mentions of the Jukebox later than that.

What does the "no wireless" complaint refer to? I don't see any mention of wireless connections for any of the Nomad Jukeboxes either.

Besides the point: I personally find the Nomad Jukebox and other MP3 players from the era extremely ugly, while the iPod looks beautiful and has become an icon (yes, Rams-inspired, but that's not a bad thing). I say this as a decidedly non-Apple-fanboy, but as an industrial designer.

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sehansen3mo ago

"The Nomad Jukebox shipped in the U.S. in September 2000." [0]

It had 6 GB of storage [1]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Nomad#Nomad_Jukebox_Z... - second to last paragraph

1: https://www.manualslib.com/manual/576463/Creative-Nomad-Juke...

aembleton3mo ago

I still think the Rio Karma looked good and it had a good interface: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_Karma

I've still got it somewhere but the HDD has died.

fainpulOP3mo ago

The Karma looks interesting – not ugly, not pretty, but kinda unique.

I had a Rio 500 [1], which I wouldn't call ugly, but certainly not beautiful and it felt like a cheaply made plastic box, even though it was expensive (64 MB flash!).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_500

kalleboo3mo ago

> What does the "no wireless" complaint refer to?

"Wireless" refers to radio (e.g. FM radio), it's a (quite outdated) Australianism

hagbard_c3mo ago

I suspect he was referring to 802.11b WiFi when he said the thing has no 'wireless' option, not the lack of a radio receiver. 802.11b (and 802.11a) were launched in 1999 and as such predate these high-capacity digital music players. 802.11b was not fast by modern standards (raw data rate up to 11 Mbit/s, practical throughput ~5.9Mbit/s for TCP, ~7.1 Mbit/s UDP) so it would have taken a while to dump a large collection to these devices.

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