They got into shrinking hardware and made great consumer gadgets that were not expandable with hardware but much better. The first iPhone had a headphone jack, it didn’t need a weird one like the Sony Erickson, I don’t think the palm had one. I had used a Mac in grade school with a mean teacher that died of cancer (they said thats why she was so mean, I don’t buy it), it played crappy math games, and Oregon trail, it looked weird since I was used to windows and my friend got a Mac laptop for school that was nice I think it was a G3 or something. No more locked down than any laptop of that era.
The iPod didn’t have expandable storage, but nobody did and AA or AAA batteries sucked. The iPhone didn’t have battery or storage upgrades but it was a full Unix computer in your pocket.
Steve Jones mentioned why he chose mechanical, it stored more songs, in 2002 you didn’t have many gigabytes. The iPod was the size of a deck of cards, it wasn’t much larger. You listed an MP3 player you needed to add storage to, when SD cards were 8mb or 16mb for the period.
You could get 2GB flash on the iPod nano. I wouldn’t have liked the nex one, the battery life was probably worst, the iPods had good monochrome at the beginning, and the good ones they were fighting were the rio karma which also used HDD, battery, and the Archos were good too, and no different aside from the iPod needing iTunes.
The iPod didn’t have expandable storage, but nobody did and AA or AAA batteries sucked. The iPhone didn’t have battery or storage upgrades but it was a full Unix computer in your pocket.