iRiver

» see iriver.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

iRiver was a korean company that made portable mp3 players from 1999 onwards. For a few years in the early 2000s they were one of the main alternatives to the ipod. The pitch was always the same. More features, more file formats, smaller price, weirder industrial design.

I had an iriver H10 around 2005 or 2006. The reason was simple. The ipod was too expensive for a turkish university student. The H10 was about half the price, had a real color screen instead of a tiny grayscale one, played ogg vorbis without making me convert anything, and looked like a thing from a sci-fi movie. The interface was honestly not as good as the ipod's. But it worked, and i could put my own music on it without itunes.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually did better ~

iriver players supported file formats that the ipod refused to. Ogg vorbis was the big one. WMA, FLAC for some models, ASF, even some weird ones. If you cared about audio quality and you had ripped your cds yourself, the iriver was the more serious gadget.

They also had real fm radios. Some models had a built-in microphone for voice recording, which was useful in a way that nobody really talks about anymore. I used mine to record a few classes in 2006. The audio quality was bad but it worked.

The H10 had a click wheel that was not capacitive. It actually clicked when you turned it. Mechanical. The ipod's touch wheel felt smoother. The iriver's felt like a real piece of hardware.

~ how it died ~

The ipod won, then the iphone won. Around 2008 it was already obvious that nobody was going to buy a dedicated mp3 player anymore. iRiver tried to pivot. They made e-readers. They made some android phones. None of it caught on.

In 2012 they launched a brand called Astell&Kern, which is high-end portable audio for audiophiles. Five hundred dollar players, gold-plated connectors, that kind of thing. The mass-market iriver brand kept fading, and by around 2014 the regular iriver name was effectively gone. The company is still alive as Astell&Kern, but the iriver of the early 2000s, the cheap ipod alternative, is not a thing anymore.

~ what we lost ~

The dedicated mp3 player as a category. There was a brief moment around 2003 to 2007 where there were maybe twenty different brands making these things. iRiver, Creative, Cowon, Sandisk, Archos, the small ones nobody remembers. Each had different file format support, different battery life, different bizarre design choices. Then the iphone came and the whole category collapsed into one thing in everybody's pocket.

The other thing we lost was the small ritual of putting music on a device by hand. You picked the songs. You dragged them over usb. You looked at the file count. The streaming era is more convenient, but you do not really own the music. I still have the H10 in a drawer somewhere. The battery is dead but the songs are still on it.