originalpckelly's Journal

I love music, but I've come to hate my iPod and the iPods of other people. First, let's talk about the fact that you have to dim the screen to get a decent battery life, and it just looks shitty.

The device looks really nice, until you touch it. Any fingerprints are instantly noticeable. So, like everyone else's, mine hides in a case most of the time. It's a nice case, but I think it was a little overpriced at about $29. It's overpriced, just like most iPod accessories.

The sound quality isn't really all that great. On the iPod Classic or Nano (the main model people buy), it's hard to search for songs as one can in iTunes on a computer. 1,000+ songs in your pocket aren't easily navigated without effective search or a mouse and large screen to click a visible list.

Everyone who buys from the iTunes Store and wants to pay the lowest price for their music (aka normal people), is stuck with a library of music that can only be played on an iPod. We are told by Mr. Jobs himself that this is not by Apple's design, but the record companies. Who knew the record companies wanted to lock people into Apple's proprietary hardware?

And let's talk about the societal consequences of people zoned out on music, instead of making basic conversation. People are fucking rude when they have an iPod on. If you say hi, they have to see you say it, and then you have to go through the obligatory, "Could you say that again, I had my iPod on?"

I suspect the latter phenomenon has been around for a while, after all there have been Walkmans for decades now, but you could only carry so many CDs or tapes at a time. Eventually you'd get tired of listening to the same damn thing and take the headphones off. And the headphones, yes, let's talk about those for a second. The iPod uses earbuds, which reduce the amount of audio which can be heard by the wearer versus old fashioned on the ear designs.

Now everyone has an iPod. Now you can "think different" like everyone else.