As someone who was There At The Time, the UX of the iPod was really, really good. There were few, if any, other companies that could match it. The vast majority of competing music players were what DankPods calls "nuggets" - i.e. barely functional e-waste that were either saddled down with horrible software (e.g. anything Sony made), had horrible controls, were bulky and painful to use, or some combination of those above dealbreakers. A lot of companies treated developing an MP3 player like any other kind of music player, and ignored the fact that these things could hold 100x as much music as anything else on the market, which necessitated a completely new UX.
To be clear, there were good non-Apple MP3 players, but they were either marketed poorly, or late arrivals (e.g. the Toshiba player that got rebadged into the Zune). By the time those existed (and tech companies started hiring UI/UX people), Apple was doing a complete reset of another product category: smartphones.
I suspect history would have been different had, say, MiniDisc hadn't failed horribly in America[0]. Pre-iPod, portable music in the US was either compact cassettes with all the downsides of tape, or CD players that could just barely fit in your pocket. The iPod was such a step up from either that it all but became a genericized trademark. Had we had a competing technology from not the 1980s, we probably wouldn't have thought the iPod was so great. Or at least, people I knew who had MiniDisc looked at the iPod like I look at all the e-waste that was trying to compete with the iPod.
[0] Yes, I know that Sony was basically trying to avoid a repeat of DAT getting banned
The iPod is the only Apple product I have ever purchased. I could easily operate the iPod without having to looking at it constantly which was great for bike rides or car rides. No fiddling and taking eyes off road.
The ipod was a very welcome step in the portable music player tech evolution at the time, but it also coincided with a bunch of people that were suddenly Very Into Music for a few years. I don't fault anyone for thinking the previous portables were just not good enough to every day carry, but they also never seemed to notice that the OG white earbuds were more painful and sounded much worse than a decent brand of $15 black earbuds. Maybe never finding good earbuds explains why they gave up on their Passion for portable music within a few years.
To be clear, there were good non-Apple MP3 players, but they were either marketed poorly, or late arrivals (e.g. the Toshiba player that got rebadged into the Zune). By the time those existed (and tech companies started hiring UI/UX people), Apple was doing a complete reset of another product category: smartphones.
I suspect history would have been different had, say, MiniDisc hadn't failed horribly in America[0]. Pre-iPod, portable music in the US was either compact cassettes with all the downsides of tape, or CD players that could just barely fit in your pocket. The iPod was such a step up from either that it all but became a genericized trademark. Had we had a competing technology from not the 1980s, we probably wouldn't have thought the iPod was so great. Or at least, people I knew who had MiniDisc looked at the iPod like I look at all the e-waste that was trying to compete with the iPod.
[0] Yes, I know that Sony was basically trying to avoid a repeat of DAT getting banned