cool kid report

The forerunner of "mp3" player technology has acheived near universal acceptance, having been accepted and purchased both by the "girls eager to remove songs from hard drive" and "hand these nerds something to put linux on" communities.

The iPod has become as much of a status symbol as anything else these days. In fact, I would much sooner get a broken iPod and pretend to listen to it than purchase a real one and have to worry about keeping its battery charged. This would probably not have the intended effect of deterring people from talking to me as I rock out to my imagined iTunes on my stylish iEarBuds but rather compel passerbies to engage me in boorish iConversation which no amount of gesturing could stop.

As anyone who keeps up with trendy techno news has already read today, Apple gave its growing fan club a price break on the new generation of iPods while simultaneously allowing members of the older generations to tell stories of how costly it was to be hip back in the early days.

I have a personal problem with iPods, and I feel it's worth mentioning here because you're not likely to see it in any mainstream media. Apple requires you to use proprietary software to transfer music onto the iPod. As far as I know, they don't seem to be using it to egregiously limit the songs which can be transfered onto the iPod, but they could start doing so whenever they release a new version of the software. Some people will argue that this is merely an inconvenience and doesn't much affect the actual usage of the device, but to me it makes a big difference. The simple fact is, there's no technological reason why a user shouldn't be able to plug in iPod into any computer, drag some music files onto the icon and listen to them. Instead, users are forced to install software approved by Apple. The fact that no one makes an issue out of this means that it is unlikely that any mp3 players will bother implementing a better system, simply because no one knows that there's anything wrong with the iPod. In the end there's nothing I can do about it other than offer my antipathy for the trendy device and put linux on as many of them as I can. The rest of you hipsters should feel really cool about spending $300 on a device that doesn't allow you to utilize its full potential simply because Apple doesn't feel like you should be able to.


Currently reading: Uncanny X-men #174: Romances
Shame of the day: Slept in late and missed meeting at work/took guitar pick from the ground and kept it
Cubicle addition of the day: Antistatic wrist and shoe straps. Not very exciting, but almost guaranteed to have very little static charge.