Steve Jobs’s Apple took over from Sony, creator of the Walkman, in conjuring up indispensable products we hadn’t realised we even needed until he presented them to us all in an iconically cute white plastic shell. Apple spawned stylish computers that didn’t require a degree in applied mathematics just to open up a new document; portable music players that could store every great song ever recorded, and also some Simply Red; video iPods; and mobile phones that add spice to keeping in touch.
I don’t merely use mine for music (though it is nice to have my entire CD collection in such a small package). I have all my teaching resources loaded onto it as well, video clips, audio clips, power-point slides converted to jpeg… The thing is brilliant… And now that it’s possible to enter appointments directly into the iPod Touch (are PDAs obsolete now?) I may just have to accidentally drop my current iPod on the floor… from a great height. I wish I wasn’t so into gadgets, but I find them hard to resist.
I resisted for a while, until my daughter bought a Creative Zen MP3 player (8GB) to celebrate her High School graduation, and I saw the benefit of taking a box the size of a deck of cards over packing up a box of CDs everytime I wanted to go somewhere and take music with me.
Now I have an iRiver 20GB that holds text documents (i.e., resumé), photos, music and has an FM radio and voice recorder. For under $150 on sale. Like LfN, I have the majority of my music collection on the player (no sense in putting all the songs from the ones I don’t like, so I just put the songs I do like from all the CDs and create a ‘playlist’). Now my wife wants one. Oh well, after Thanksgiving sales are coming up in a few months!
But I didn’t buy the iPod, for less price, I get the same features and (from what I hear) less problems.
Peace
Jim Elliott