The fact that Macs were a small niche was instrumental for the music industry to accept to put legal songs online after the Napster coup. It allowed Steve Jobs to convince them to support trying the model of all songs at the same price because the potential market was so small it didn't really matter if it worked or failed. By being able to conduct a business experiment in a way no one else could, Apple had a huge edge here. The music industry would not have accepted to try such a model directly on Windows at the time and Apple got a huge lead.
Sort of related to your comment: IMO the common thread in all (recent-ish?) Apple products is that the first iteration is usually rough around the edges and met with the most amount of criticism, then what always seems to happen is that Apple takes the feedback to heart and massively improves on subsequent iterations. Some examples I can think of:
* While the first MacBook Air was crazy expensive and nearly universally panned for lack of a DVD-ROM drive, the MBA was repositioned in 2011 as the ultraportable replacement for the MacBook and is now the best-selling Mac.
* The first iPhone was blasted for its absurd price (due in part to lack of carrier subsidization), lack of 3G, lack of copy and paste (remember how upset people got about this? lol) and no third party apps. By the time the 3G rolled around, most of the software concerns were addressed and the price drop made sales jump $10m from 2007 to 2008.
* The first iPad (also known as the iTampon if you were following Twitter on the day it was announced) was criticized as being a giant iPhone, having a low pixel density (merely 1024x768), and lacking any ability to get "real work" done on it. Each iteration of the iPad has gotten more and more positive reviews due to the incremental changes (mostly in processor and pixel density) made over the years.
It more or less goes without saying, then, that I'm not really surprised that people expected more from the Apple Watch. Apple's really fortunate to have such a great community of rabid early adopters who are more than happy to put its products through the ringer and hold Apple to a higher standard.
In many of those example, people complained about it, but it was still a success. People complained about the first iPhone, and yet bought it in droves.
"Failure" is not determined by "lots of complaints", but by "very few sales"
It's a trainwreck on Mac too. I use my iPod only when I go on holidays, say 3 - 4 times per year. I dread the moment I have to use iTunes to fill my iPod with songs. It causes me nothing but stress, which is exactly the opposite of what Apple is about.
I only use it on the Mac to turn off the "automatic sync" feature on the iPod, and to do a manual backup of my wife's iPad. I must say that the backup interface for the iPad within iTunes is pretty poor. Not the feature - the interface. Mighty confused.
I use Floola to shove songs on my iPod. Might be worth a look? (Mine is a 6th-gen classic).
