Archos Jukebox 6000
There’s no point in sugar-coating it: some of the earliest hard drive-based MP3 players were downright ugly. The Archos Jukebox 5000 and 6000, which contained 2.5-inch 5GB and 6GB drives inside, respectively, looks unnervingly like a hacked together pipe bomb thanks to the blue foam bumpers on every corner designed to absorb impact and protect the hard drive inside in the event of an accidental drop.
Unlike most MP3 players, which required users to struggle with proprietary software to get their music onto the device, the Jukebox 5000 and 6000 could also just be mounted to a PC with a USB connection like an ordinary external drive, allowing MP3 files to be copied over using Windows’ file explorer. That feature alone potentially justified the cost of this steeply priced option.
