And where are all these other products/companies? Gone or selling some tiny fraction of sales. Now that basically all phones are also music players, even the iPod is dying. Very few people want a stand alone music player any more.
To imagine the iPod wasn't ground breaking is to ignore the plain facts. I didn't leave off CD players and other such devices except for brevity. I owned several CD players, each one of them broke, or stopped working. And they were never a breakthrough device. They were huge, and you had to carry around cd cases. A tiny little iPod solid state device holding 1,000 or more songs, is most certainly break through. None of my ipods has stopped working. But I don't use them any more. Don't have my cassette, or CD players any more. I loaded all my CDs into my phone and have them all with me, all the time. And I have hardly bought any CD in years.
I couldn't care less if features are copied or improved upon. Once you get it right, everything else ceases to amaze or even stay relevant. Watch what happens to all the current devices once battery life per charge increases ten fold and chip, radio and screen power consumption drop ten fold.
