The pop culture blogger/columnist at the Tribune, Mark Caro, is complaining about iPods today. He says his 2nd iPod has died after 11 months of use, just as his first iPod died. Predictably, in the comments, there's a mishmash of opinion, with some people saying that Apple products are crap and why would anyone spend that much when a portable CD player works just as well (uh, sir, no it doesn't; it may work just fine, but then you have to carry forty million CDs everywhere, or something like it. And don't even get me started on audiobooks on CD.) and for god's sake they're over $300 and that's ridiculous and you should try the iRiver/Creative Labs/Jukebox model and you'll be happier with that, and of course, the Apple loyalists who rant about how if you use your iPod improperly, of course it will break, you cretin, what did you do, step on it? run it over? and buy a player with a flash drive you idiot instead of a hard drive because HARD DRIVES fail, numbnuts, and anyway, everyone knows that the iPod is more intuitive and it's just better than everything else out there which is how it became so popular in the first place, you complainer.
Of course, it's probably a little bit of both. It sucks a LOT when your iPods fails, for whatever reason. My first iPod had some diminishing battery hours problems, but I'd had it pretty long when it did start to fail, so I wasn't too upset. I was ready for a new model by then, anyway. It's not a perfect machine; and as many people (and me) pointed out, there are indeed wrong ways to use your iPod. One of them is to work out with a regular iPod on you; jostling isn't good for a machine with a hard drive in it. That's just the fact of it. If you want to work out with an mp3 player, it is indeed a better idea to get one with a flash drive. As someone else pointed out, it is only a matter of time before the bigger gig iPods come with flash drives, so Caro might wait until then to buy something. It's not complicated. Caro was beating his iPod up, whether he knew it or not; he doesn't want something with smaller storage capacity because he has a lot of music, but he wants something he can work out with. Currently, Apple doesn't make that product.
That said, I can understand some of the complaints against Apple. iPods do really become a kind of music prison once you start using them. I can't imagine ever having anything besides an iPod, very basically because of DRM, which ensures that anything I've ever bought off of iTunes has to be played on one. It's a racket, all right, but it's a racket I bought into and now I'm stuck. I do love my iPod, but let's be honest, there's only a small number of things that could lead me to abandon them, and Steve Jobs has seen to it that that's the case for literally MILLIONS of people the world over. And listen, you can bitch and moan about it all you like, but if you're a long-time iTunes user, the new DRM-EMI agreement is nice, but does practically very little for you. Unless the only music you've ever bought from iTunes is EMI music. Until the iTunes music store goes 100% anti-DRM, we're locked into iPods, and Apple knows it. The commenters who say that are 100% right.
But for my money, and of course, I'm biased, but still, for my money, it's the best option out there. I had a friend who bought a competitor's problem, and within months, she was having problems. Big problems, the kind that impair your usage of the item. I don't know anyone who's ever had problems operationally with the iPod. It's easy to get music onto it, it's easy to organize, and it's easy to update. It's a peach at organizing audiobooks vs. music, on-the-go playlists are fun and easy to make, and universal shuffle is just about the biggest thing to ever to happen to my music. I can't speak for those other machines, because I've never had one, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say again that there must be something about it that made it the most popular mp3 player ever, and I have a hunch it's not just because it had some cachet. (At the wedding I was at in CA a few weekends ago, the groom's iPod provided the music at the ceremony. He wanted to back it up, and asked if someone wouldn't mind having the music on their iPod just in case. I'm telling you, every single person in the room whipped out an iPod, metaphorically or physically. Not a iRiver or a Creative Labs thing or a Sony thing, but an iPod. It made it sinfully easy to back-up his wedding music, and that might have been the only part of the wedding weekend that was sinfully easy. It was also super-easy to play the correct music in the correct order, to fade in and out the music [with some manual, brotherly help], and really, it was perfect.) You can bitch about it all you like, but I really do believe that the iPod is the best thing out there, right at this moment.
Does the Apple DRM suck? Yeah. Does the iPod? Not really. It's a devil's bargain, I guess, and for better or worse, Caro made his choice when he bought his first iPod. I really think that if you use an iPod properly, though, you won't have it die after 11 months. Time for Caro to invest in a small nano and a big iPod. So he can run with one, and use the other one everywhere else. Sucky, but there it is.
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