Apple Introduces What It Calls an Easier to Use Portable Music Player (2001)
That last line about raising the bar... and raise it did! Apple often doesn't invent the whole thing, but definitely puts a usable version on the market. I remember the space between CD players and iPods having those rather crappy MP3 players, mini-disc players (which were actually quite good, but still used cartridges) and the really big laptop-HDD music players, and none of them were actually nice to use, or at least, not any 'nicer' than a portable CD player.This happened over and over again with the other stuff they made. It's not like there were no phones with touchscreens, or no tablets, or no smartwatches, TV media players etc. There always are/were/will be, but it's becoming something of a trend that Apple gets it's hands on one of those ideas and then puts a version on the market that actually works well for most people.