In Pod We Trust

Four years or so ago, I got one of the very first generation of Apple iPod MP3 players and fell in love with it immediately. Yeah, it held only a meager 6 GB of songs (my music collection, close to 1,000 CDs and digitized vinyl LPs large, rips to 66.4 GB of MP3 files) and has that annoying gap between songs (making the smooth song segues on Pink Floyd albums not so smooth) but, hey, for playing music in the car (thanks to the tapedeck adapter) or while working out (thanks to external speakers) it beat carrying a ton of tapes around and, for long road trips, it's nice to program a 3+-hour playlist rather than fumble with tapes or CDs).

So I had no small amount of sadness when it died last week--well, not really died: it just stopped being recognized by the Mac, meaning that nothing new could ever be uploaded to it. Which wouldn't have been too bad if I hadn't just recently cleaned everything off it and was preparing to upload things to it. Doh! Since it was long out of warranty (and Apple didn't even recognize its serial number) it would cost $250 to have it sent in and fixed--not much less than the cost of a new one. So I bought what is now the fourth-generation iPod and at 30 GB is certainly an improvement space-wise. A minor gripe is that they changed the connection interface from FireWire to USB 2.0 which is fast, yes, but it now means I have to find a new cigarette lighter adapter. OK, not a big deal in the grand scheme of things (and when you consider that many people have trouble affording food or clothing, it's such a colossally minor thing to complain about), but it does illustrate a certain irritation factor of modern technology, that changing one thing usually means that many other things will have to be changed, too.

It's also an iPod Photo--meaning you can upload photos to it (well, I can upload photos to it; you, leave it alone). Oh, I don't know. With the tiny screen (fine for displaying song info), I find that scrolling through a photo album is kind of like looking at a stamp collection. If they hope to create video iPods, they're going to have to make the screen mu-u-u-u-uch bigger.