Saturday night I made a quick trip to Best Buy to get a 40GB iPod, ’cause being on the road requires a soundtrack… But I think it’s going back after my next Jersey trip.
It’s not that the iPod sucks so much as what came in the box doesn’t live up to the money. After laying down $500 I shouldn’t have to buy a $19 USB cable ($29 at my local CompUSA) so that I can charge the thing at the same time it’s connected to my laptop, strike one. That’s not just a Windows thing, so far as I know none of Apple’s laptops have 6-pin Firewire ports either.
I think iTunes for Windows is a piece of crap that nobody should be forced to suffer with, strike two. It only supports Apple’s DRM, foul ball. The touch wheel isn’t so bad but the buttons are marginal at best, another foul.
What’s ultimately going to send this thing back to dug-out is that the UI is not driver-friendly, particularly to my method of listening to music. iTunes tells me that I have 4147 songs. My “playlist” is the whole darned collection on shuffle. When an artist or album comes up that matches my mood I like to un-shuffle and jump around. On an empeg / Rio Car this happens with a single button press on the remote, or a quick scroll-and-push on the unit itself. On an iPod it’s a variable number of Menu presses, followed by Wheel, Button, Wheel, Button. Accomplishing this task while driving is begging for an accident.
Oh, and I really friggin’ hate the color. For me it evokes images of doctors and hospitals, not exactly the warm emotional connection usually associated with Apple products.
Obviously what I really want is a portable empeg in any color but white. The same UK technical team designed the Rio Karma (I think Hugo’s crew did every non-Flash Rio audio product), the screenshots I’ve seen are highly evocative of the empeg, and it’s down to about $250… but it’s only 20GB, no remote, and I’ve never played with one so I don’t know that it’s any better in the UI department. There’s the upcoming Karma 2 that may go to 40GB, and the 4th-gen iPod will probably launch in the Fall at 60GB…
Update: I’ve been corrected, current PowerBooks and iBooks do have 6-pin Firewire ports. WTF?
Update2: Joel @ Gizmodo says “White is beautiful, like snow, or semen.” Last Christmas in South Florida was so freaking hot that I found myself missing the beauty of a fresh snow-covered field, but snow has never been something that I want to touch. I have similar sentiments towars semen…
Update3: I don’t care for playlists. My decision-making style is to wait for the last possible moment, as it allows unnecessary decisions to be avoided completely. Playlists are the opposite of that.
