Über-coolness or Peer-pressure?
Monday, June 9th, 2008OK, so recently I did the nigh-unthinkable: I bought an iPod.
I know, I know.
But it still has the best user experience of all the (stock*) MP3 players out there.
(*I hear you can put Linux on some of them and it can make ‘em that much better, but I’m not there yet.)
Sure, iTunes is a real pain for anyone with more than six braincells—well, more than six computer-savvy braincells. Sure, it uses an internal, non-user-replaceable battery. No, you can’t just mount it as a flash-drive and drop music on it and have it access them. (You can just use it as storage, but that seems like a bit of a waste of an 8GB iPod nano, which is what I got.)
But it’s tiny. And you can watch movies on it. Yes, the screen is small, and pixels are so small as to be nigh undetectable by the unaided human eye, but it’s pretty cool to be stuck somewhere, waiting for someone to show up so you can do whatever it is you’re there waiting for them for, and just whip out the ol’ iPod and watch the next ten minutes of whatever it was you were watching when life interrupted.
I got it right before taking off for the weekend with my boys for a fathers-and-sons outing …
(note to self, write about that, too)
… and only had time to throw on a few albums before heading out to the western Utah desert. (They don’t call it a desert for nothing, let me tell you.) I played with it a little while out there and a little when we got back before my Sweetie noticed and asked, “When did you get an iPod?”
I eventually had to let her try it out. She had it in her possession for all of—and I’m not making this up—exactly four seconds before asking “So, when are you going to get one?” Yeah, exactly.
So either I have an über-cool new toy, or I’ve finally sold out to the iPod generation. The jury is still out.
(Did I mention I got a “reconditioned” one, so it was, like, 30% off? Does that make me less of a sell-out?)