The responses to this make me feel old.
For those who answered ‘no’ and didn’t look it up, this was the Slashdot review of the original iPod, which subsequently became an enormously successful consumer electronics product. It became a meme for geeks not understanding the things that make people actually like a product (which seems relevant with respect to Discord at the moment).
The Nomad (from Creative Labs, the maker of SoundBlaster and related lawsuits) had a terrible UI and exposed itself as a mass-storage device. You just had to copy your files across. The iPod required you to use iTunes (the next version that worked with Windows also allowed an alternative music player).
iTunes was also unpopular with the Slashdot set because they had folder hierarchies for organising music and didn’t want something else in the way of their organisation. Only 10-20% of the population thinks of hierarchies as the structure for organisation and music is a great example of their limitations. If you do band/album/track, how do you find all of the track by a particular artist on compilations (you’ll end up with a big ‘Various Artists’ folder)? If you want a playlist that is ‘all music from the ‘60s that isn’t classical or by The Beatles’ (an actual playlist I had in iTunes), the hierarchical view doesn’t help, but iTunes model of a soup of tracks filtered by metadata did. Gmail also leaned into this model, with tags and searches rather than traditional mail folders.
The iPod itself had 5 GB of space on a micro drive (1.8” hard disk). That was enough for 40-50 CDs at 128 Kb/s, which was more music than a lot of people owned, so just plug it in and it syncs all of your music was a much better interface than copying files in a file manager. I think my hard disk, when the iPod came out, was 20 GB, and I didn’t want to use 1/4 for music! You put a CD in your computer, iTunes ripped it automatically and then the next time you plugged in the iPod it was sync’s (and play counts for the tracks were sync’s back. These also were usable in smart playlists. I had one for ‘underplayed good songs’ which found things with a rating of 4-5 stars with a low play count). If you had more music than would fit, you could select playlists to sync and it would copy those. This included smart playlists, so you could create simple saved metadata searches and sync all the tracks they found, even if you never played them as a playlist.
You had less control in this model than with the Nomad, but it didn’t matter because the thing that most people wanted to do almost all of the time was *very* easy, whereas the Nomad made it harder.
As Jef Raskin argued, making difficult things possible shouldn’t come at the expense of making simple things easy.
Without searching or guessing, do you know which product the review ‘No Wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.’ Refers to?