Am I the only person who keeps forgetting that their iPod is a mp3 player? I use mine almost exclusively as a portable, external firewire hard drive. I actually spent a few minutes recently wondering what that round port on the top (2nd gen model) was for… “Oh, that’s right, I can plug headphones into this, too…”
About that time I realized I have really crappy taste in music, too.
I’m happy with my Creative Zen Micro (6gig). I was more than happy with the sound quality, and the fact that it came with a few things built-in that you have to buy an add-on to do for the iPod. It doubles as a portable hard drive. Uses a USB 2.0 cord to transfer files and recharge it, instead of a docking station. The controls I found were a lot easier to navigate. The menus are all customizable, and of course it was cheaper than an iPod. 
It does what I need it to do and more.
Much like an iPod does whatever whoever buys them needs them to do. After all they did choose an iPod over the others.
You know, there are vastly less expensive and higher capacity portable hard drives around…
Big difference, Im not selling anything. Steve Jobs is.
No question, big logos, big marketing wins…but there is the popular culture argument, by owning an iPod we all now have something in common with people well outside your class…like Paris Hilton and Bono!
sorry, should have said all now have something in common with people well outside OUR class, not your. I also forgot to add George Bush to my list of IPod fan examples.
True, but hey, mine was a gift, and hey, who knew it played music too? 
I think Drinking the Kool Aidwas pretty compelling as well. Did it offer any real value? Was it compelling? Are Ipods shiny and sparkley?
Oh god, here we go again. I am so tired of this shit. Yes, a few years ago having an iPod was really cool and funky because they were the nifties portable music player around and they were rare and SO much cooler than a MD player or walkman or whatever. Nowadays an iPod is the ‘standard’ music player and everyone is really proud of their Rios or Zens or iRivers or whatever because they are SO much better than an iPod, proving the innate superioirty and sexual attractiveness of the person owning it.
Congratulations. We are all extremely impressed with your ability to slap down a few bucks and get a different make of chinese-manufactured laptop-hard-drive-in-hot-pants music player and bleat on tirelessly about how superior it is to Apple’s chinese-manufactured laptop-hard-drive-in-hot-pants music player.
Now fuck off.
As successful as cell phones.
Kool Aid is over-saturation! It’s all hype!
Real suicide pact cult members drink* Flavor Aid*. It is far superior to your popular name brand beverage.
Kool Aid! Pah! You only drink it to look cool! It only makes 2 quarts of juice, and requires a whole cup of sugar to taste good! I bet you dye your hair with it, too. Poser.
Yes, those of us who prefer the iPod to other mp3 players are hype-addled sheep who couldn’t possibly find any of the design or functionality of Apple’s products compelling. (I already answered this exact dim sentiment, do I need to reword it and answer it again for you?)
Wow. I didn’t realize my iPod (black! video! I AM YOUR FATHER) was a symbol of my desire to conform and my oneness with American pop culture. I always thought I got it because it’s well made, has an intuitive menu and an easy-to-use interface, and it holds the audiobooks from my favorite website.
I got a Creative Jukebox. More to the point, I had a series of about five. I kept having to return them to Best Buy – once during the 1-year extended warranty time because the battery stopped charging, and then multiple times after that because the blessed thing just stopped working. It’s not like I was using it as a maraca or a basketball, either; I carried it paranoidly in my pocket and laid it gently on the car seat when I was listening to it through the tape deck. Damn thing KEPT FAILING after a week, two weeks, three. I swear they just kept repackagaing the same faulty player and giving it back.
I tried upgrading to the Touch, but audible.com didn’t support it. It needed a firmware upgrade, and from the moans of woe and fury from the community on their forums I could surmise that firmware updates to any of the Creative player products were few and far between.
I once worked for Apple. I played with the iPod before it was publicly available. I thought it was fairly nifty and would take off well. I kind of wanted one, but not when I saw the price tag.
Gosh, I don’t remember much that it has that the current iPods don’t come with. Refresh my memory.
So does the iPod, right out of the box.
So does the iPod, right out of the box. Annoyingly it DOESN’T come with an actual power adapter anymore, so you have to buy one of those separately. I was peeved.
:eek: Oh, so YOU’RE the guy they made it for. See, I really didn’t like my Jukebox’s controls. Took me a while to figure them out. Maybe the Micro is different. Me, once someone showed me how the little wheelie-dealy on the iPod works, I was tooling around just fine.
You got me there. iPod’s menus aren’t customizable – like all Apple products they’re geared more toward ease of use than customization. And they’re expensive – sometimes $50+ more than the competition. Personally I think they’re more or less worth it, but ehh, what do I know? I just use one.
Look – use whatever it is you find better. Lots of people find it cool to have what everyone else has. It seems like almost everyone else finds it cool to be marginalized. Nobody’s heard of Tolkien? Bunch of Philistines, his books are the best thing to happen to fiction in a thousand years. Wait, they made movies out of them? I never liked him anyway. Too overexposed.
Newsflash: it’s OKAY to like something even if everyone else does. Your indie bands sound just as good coming out of an iPod.
Amen. If only these people would realise that transistors are WAY too mass-market. Then they could occupy themselves building an MP3 player out of vaccum tubes, mahogany and copper wire. But wait! Only sheeple have MP3 players. Wax cylinders, now THATS a format that dares to be different…
So, are you pitting CNN’s lazy reporting? Because while the article talked about iPods, the curriculum being made available digitally should play on any mp3 player.
I guess Jobs is the new Gates. Never fails. Gotta love the human race…we are so very predictable.
Whenever I see the iPod “holy wars” being played out on a message board, I always think of this comic. 
The only thing about iPod I don’t get is that they seem to be more expensive than almost every other MP3 player out tere. I got a 512 MB Sandisk player for less than $50.
Really? So let’s reduce it down.
We’ll call your Sandisk $50, because that’s the price I found here.
My iPod is $299 here.
Your Sandisk is 512 MB. This is 1/2 of 1 gigabyte.
My iPod is 30 gigabytes. It is 60 of your Sandisks. Sixty. Sixty Sandisks at $50 per equals $3000.
Looking at my iPod today I have it approximately half full. I’m glad I do – I have several of my favorite books on here plus numerous albums and individual songs and playlists. It will play all day long. I can’t find a battery life for your Sandisk, I’m afraid. It might be better. You’ve got me there – maybe you can listen to 1/60th of the content for twice the time.
Google “build your own mp3 player” sometime.
I’m not even kidding.
Though honestly, I think a pencilbox-sized mp3 player made of brass and glass and mahogany and copper wire with vacuum tubes on the end would make a KILLER fashion statement. Maybe with a set of those Princess Leia stereo headphones from the 80s, though it would be more aesthetically pleasing with just a wireless transmitter that goes to the 'phones you have strategically implanted into your vintage grey fedora.
I still might have an iPod plugged into it, though.
I have no problem with the iPod, but those headphones SUCK. I ride public transit all the time and I can hear your music! And I hate your music! Go buy yourself a decent set of headphones if you’re going to be listening to your iPod in crowded spaces and spare the rest of us.
Yeah, I can’t stand the feel of earbuds in my ear. And as a vague bit of annoyance with the ubiquity of the white iPod – I wanted a cheap pair of headphones with the crosspiece thingy, whatever it’s called that actually holds the boogers on your head, going behind my head as opposed to over it like a headband. The only pair I could find for less than a stupidly large cost were flimsy and white. Don’t go with my VaderPod at all. 
You know, this thread seems to be as good a place as any for me to put in a brief hijack about corporate hate.
Back when I worked at Apple in their tech support department, we were all told that the two reasons our computers and such cost so darn much was A) because the components were better (which I’m willing to believe, at least so far as Apple pays artists and such a lot of money to make their stuff look pretty and trendy and cutting-edge) and B) because of the wonderful tech support. I certainly did learn a lot in the two weeks of formal training I got at the beginning of the job, and almost every week we could take a few hours or even half a day to learn something different and new. We were paid for the time off the phones and everything. I’m not afraid of saying that by and large, Apple support is better than most other large computer companies when it comes to technical support.
Yet people complain because of the higher price. You really do get what you pay for, though. If Apple lowered their prices, they’d have to make crappier computers or outsource all their support to India. I know, at least, that the person I called when I was having trouble with my iPod was probably from somewhere in North America.
But the same people who complain about Apple complain that Wal-Mart, which has some of the lowest prices on positively anything, barely trains its sales staff and pays them a pittance. Well, yes. Either you’re going to have well-paid well-trained staff and support or they’re going to be poorly paid and poorly trained. You have to pay more for people who are well paid. It’s kind of… obvious, you know?
“But,” my cheapskate friends say! “But Apple could lower the prices on their stuff if they took less profit! THEY’RE JUST IN IT FOR THE MONEY!”
News flash. OF COURSE THEY ARE. Remember high school economics? It was only a semester-long class at my school but I remember it clearly. There’s a sweet spot on the scale of what people are willing to pay for any product that maximizes your profit. No sane person is going to set their prices below that sweet spot unless they’re getting some other benefit from it.
The most benevolent and gentle and do-no-harm and laid-back corporations and companies and businesses are all the same in that they want to make a profit. Oh, they also want to perform a service or provide a product, but they’re not going to do it for free. And I’ll stand by your side and rant and rave about inflated CEO salaries and bad accounting practices and mistreatment of workers and all, but you have to understand that in the end everyone wants to make a profit.
There’s a word for a company that’s not out to make a profit. And no, it’s not ‘bankrupt’, though for some well-meaning people that might apply.
It’s charity.
I suppose you are right. But, I can put 120 songs on my Sandisk which is more than enough for my needs, primarily for the gym. I can set up playlists on my computer and transfer easy as pie. No reason for me to go spend $299 in that case.