Fully agreed on the hw support though. I had an mp3 player discman knock off, later cheap mp3 players and none of them played Ogg Vorbis, I want to say one of my Nokia dumbphones in the mid 00s could do mp3 but not Ogg Vorbis as well.
A lot of the widely popular s1mp3s could play Ogg, FLAC, APE, WMA, and a few other obscure formats (as well as plain uncompressed WAV) but I think the real reason was a lack of availability - except for the anti-patent/FOSS purists, and some MS fans using WMA, everyone else was using MP3.
Fully agreed on the hw support though. I had an mp3 player discman knock off, later cheap mp3 players and none of them played Ogg Vorbis, I want to say one of my Nokia dumbphones in the mid 00s could do mp3 but not Ogg Vorbis as well.