Prior to the first iPod, Creative's only hard drive based portables were the Nomads, both of which were roughly the same size as a portable CD player, and heavier. Don't get me wrong, they were cool, but they were literally twice the size of an iPod.

In '03, two years after the first iPod came along, Creative released the Zen, which was a similar physical size to the iPod. It was nowhere near as cool to use an an iPod, and was nowhere near as beautifully designed.

There were a lot of mp3 players in this space and Apple didn’t rewrite anything.

There were, and they all used some kind of low capacity removable storage. You can shout and holler all you like, but the fact is that Apple were the first company to make a pocketable, high capacity (for the time) music player. As with so many other of their products, they didn't invent the market, but they refined it down to something that people would rush out to buy, or wish they could afford.

The Nokia n95 was a better phone than the iPhone in every comparison in 2007

Yeah, I get where you're coming from. The N95 was a beast of a phone. But don't forget that Nokia had been banging out phones for 20 years by that point, they'd nailed their market and knew a thing or two. The first iPhone was Apple's first foray into the market, and while the thing wasn't perfect (only had GPRS/Edge, no apps, limited features, weird headphone jack) it hit the ground running and was a platform for bigger things. Apple innovated.

And yeah, touchscreen keyboards were cumbersome. On resistive screen phones. I remember using an iPod touch shortly after they came out, and was blown away by how much better the keyboard was on that beautiful capacitive screen, and how shoddy my HTC Kaiser felt by comparison.

Windows Media Player 9 only ripped CDs to WMA files because it didn’t include a licensed mp3 encoder. It didn’t support MP3 ripping directly until WMP10 in 2004.

Nonsense. Palm was not better. I sold Palm, Treo, and Blackberry phones at the time and the sudden drop in confidence was palpable. Your second statement is completely wrong too. The entire difference between the iPhone was that it didn’t use mobile web. Safari was a desktop-class browser, unlike the others (minus Flash, obviously). Even Windows devices like PocketPCs didn’t have full browsers.

Again, the iPod statement is just flat-out false. The alternatives at the time were Walkman devices, Creative Labs devices, and devices from Diamond, and crap like the RCA Kazoo. All of them had tiny LCD displays, 256MB of memory max, and transferred music like glorified flash drives. Tags had to be managed manually. Playlists weren’t a thing unless you created them in separate software. There was nothing “identical” about them.

Steve Jobs pulling out a 5GB iPod from his pocket broke the industry and started the whole market, changing the field from a niche for nerds into music for everyone. On top of that, it started the podcast revolution and that is undeniable. To say that it wasn’t unique or better is revisionist history.