You’re looking at what was the State of the Art in portable hard drive-based MP3 players, before Apple finally released the iPod in late 2001. Meet the Genica RooPaq. Essentially, it was little more than a 2.5 inch hard drive enclosure, with a USB interface, two-line LCD text-only display, a battery and the bare minimum chipset needed to play MP3 audio files. It came with exactly zero bytes of disk space; the idea was that you could open the unit up and install a laptop hard drive of “any size,” and you could then dictate how much space you wanted the player to have. The cost? $299 plus the cost of the hard drive.
It was released shortly after rumors began surfacing of Apple’s pending entry into the music player market, and I imagine its manufacturer wanted to get a head start in order to beat Apple at its own game. They probably thought they had a winner, too. Why would anyone pay $500 for an overpriced iPod when for almost a quarter of the price less you could have something that does the same thing?

And I agreed. A full summer before the original iPod debuted, I bought a RooPaq off eBay. It was a bit larger than a brick, and came about as close in weight. With the 20GB hard drive I installed constantly spinning when powered up, the player had a then-impressive 1.5 to 2 hours of run time between charges. There was no slick iTunes-like interface to manage content; the method of transfer was simple drag-and-drop of the files through a connected computer’s operating system. Yes, it was The Shit. And as I lugged this beast around with me, I too thought “what is Apple thinking? No one is going to buy an iPod when they can have one of these!”

Then I got to see an iPod on display. Marvelled at its tiny size and 10-hour battery life, stood agog at its elegantly simple yet effective interface, and realized that sometimes looks are everything. And I knew I had been robbed.

Well, not really robbed. No matter how great the interface was, I still fresh out of college and quite broke at the time. Barely able to justify the RooPaq’s expense, there was no way I could shell out $500 for a simple mp3 player, no matter how good the features. But I did save my pennies for the day when I could get one.