So much for the frequent claim that Apple is all marketing and no new technology, I guess.
Analysis like that tend to focus on single technologies like capacitive touchscreens or e-ink displays. Pretty much all the different single technologies many recent Apple products brought together existed in some way, shape or form before in consumer products. Single technologies don't make a product. Oh, and the UI matters. Having the same exact hardware with a better UI really does matter.
I had an Archos 15 gig when the iPod came out. Although it is now long gone and I have an iPod 40 gig from a few generations ago, a nano from the tall thin era, am on my second iPhone and have an iPad, I'll say this for Archos:
It still totally takes any Apple music playing device completely to school when it comes to classical music.
iPods are really wrapped up in the idea that you have artists, who produce albums, which contain songs, and if you don't want to organize your collection around those three dimensions, screw you.
In classical, we want six dimensions, not three: composer, orchestra, conductor, soloists, composition, and movement or piece within the composition.
Yes, iPod lets you list by composer. However, that just brings up a list of songs (tracks). However, most (all?) iPods have arbitrary and small limits on how long a title can be and still allow you to see everything in it. For instance, on my Vivaldi list, I see 3 different "Concerto für Laute, Violi...". If I'm lucky, maybe I can remember that the one I'm looking for is relatively short, so the 2:06 one is the one I want, not the 3:30 or the 5:03.
Let's compare to my old Archos. With the Archos, one option was to simply put a directory hierarchy on the device, and then access it via a simple file browser interface. If you hit "play" in a directory without a particular track selected, it would play everything in that directory, in alphabetical order.
So, I'd rip each CD into its own directory, with each track file starting with its track number (padded with a leading 0 if less than two digits). I could then organize these directories in a tree any way I wanted. For my rock, folk, and pop, I could use artist/album. For classical I could do composer/conductor/orchestra/composition for those that did not feature a soloist. For those with a soloist, I could toss in a directory in there to organize by soloist.
With the Archos, I never had to fish around to find what I wanted to find. With iPod I've sometimes spent several minutes trying to find something I know is there.
BTW, I used the same organization on my desktop machine, and made sure to use a music player that would handle drag-and-drop reasonably--drop a track on it and it plays it, drop a directory on it and it plays all tracks in alphabetical order. Then all I needed was a file browser on the desktop and music playback was dealt with there, too.
People have made classical work reasonably with iTunes on the desktop, by repurposing some of the fields. But that doesn't stop the suckage on iPods.
Actually, what you describe doesn't make the Archos brilliant, rather it seems to me as if it is so simple, that the burden of organization shifts to the user. Which of course worked out great in your case, and would probably for most people here, but, in my mind, a really good device would take care of organization all by itself, in a way that just works.
I too would love to see the iPod improve in areas other than "just" organizing contemporary music. (Besides classical music, audiobook support for example is almost ridiculously bad, and even podcast support is lacking in major ways.)
I don't have an Archos (and actually have never seen one) so I don't know but it's possible it doesn't force you to organize your music yourself: the post you replied to says one option was to dump a directory hierarchy.
Right. They also bundled player software for the PC that would organize things for you by metadata, and generate playlists to sync to the player that reflected that organization.
You didn't have to organize your music into directories and manage it yourself unless you wanted to.
Neither method really works for Jazz, though. Sometimes, the group would have a name, but many times, only one person's name is on the album cover. But, some great musicians never fronted a band, and none of them are bandleaders for their whole career, and sometimes the lineup of a group would change while the name stayed the same.
And unfortunately, which you switch from the main part of desktop iTunes to the iTunes store, all the problems return in force. I once mistakenly bought the no-choir version of a song I was looking for because I couldn't see the whole title.
The reason it works for tzs is because Archos didn't give a shit about metadata at all — they implemented the crappiest thing that could possibly work. Apple's use of a metadata database prebuilt by iTunes makes using the iPod massively easier for the vast majority of people.
This infuriates the drag-and-drop anoraks that had been obsessing over their folder structure ever since they started downloading metadataless MP3 files from FTP sites and IRC fserves in the 90s.
The player didn't care about metadata. However, it did understand playlists, so Archos would bundle with player software for the PC that DID use metadata to organize things, and would sync with the Archos by writing out playlists that reflected that organizaion.
Thus, an ordinary user could indeed have an iPod-like experience of letting software manage his player for him (although the player Archos bundled was not as good as iTunes).
classicalarchives.com does the the best of anyone out there, right now. Go see for yourself. Unlimited streaming from a huge catalogue for $10/month. And the site is well-organized; easy to find anything.
You might want to try COWON mp3 players -- they have the directory structure for tracks and a very good sound quality. I never looked back and everyone how tried COWON do not look at iPods either anymore.
(Just a reply to the parenthetical - probably because Android hasn't been tuned for/doesn't support tablet-sized screens yet - 2.3 is the first release to be designed for tablets.)
It took forever to boot. When I dropped mine and broke its disk I then swapped in a 6GB disk and it took even longer, around 2 minutes. I went back to an mp3 discman instead before getting a Mac mini in 2005, which opened my eyes to the fact that Apple made more than just pretty devices, they cared about UI and paid attention to details like having different volume settings for headphones. I then bought a 60gb iPod w/ video and haven't looked back.
Analysis like that tend to focus on single technologies like capacitive touchscreens or e-ink displays. Pretty much all the different single technologies many recent Apple products brought together existed in some way, shape or form before in consumer products. Single technologies don't make a product. Oh, and the UI matters. Having the same exact hardware with a better UI really does matter.