Thursday, April 20, 2006
Den Guru: Who Designed This Crap? The Great Ipod Scam
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 02:00 PM
"WARNING: If you own an Apple Ipod or have a passionate desire to own one, reading this article could be hazardous to your health. On the other hand it might help you break or avoid a nasty and expensive habit. I don't remember most of the dreams I have, whether nice or nasty. But, man, did I remember one from last week. I was on this really long and rambling road being chased by millions of Ipods of every size and shape. Though none of their earbuds were plugged in, there were so many of the things I could hear the mother of all mixes, every song, podcast and TV show available on Itunes. That's not all; behind all the Ipods was a bunch of silent zombie-like humans led by Steve Jobs. All of them had tons of folding money falling out of their pockets and eye sockets. I recognized most of these celebs. Everyone was there from Job's Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak to ex-Disney head Michael Eisner to a passel of entertainers including Britney Spears, rapper Ghostface Killa, Michael from NBC's "The Office" dragging a zombie birthday cake and Josef Suk, classical violinist."
This is a rather entertaining, but certainly controversial article, especially if you're an iPod fan. The 309 comments posted to the article would seem to indicate that it touched a few nerves. ;-) I'll add my own story to this topic: a friend of mine went out and bought a 30GB iPod Video a few days ago. We talked about why he bought it, and after a few days he ended up returning it. Why? He had a mixture of MP3s and WMAs, and the iPod won't play WMAs. No, importing the WMAs and transcoding them so they sound like crap isn't a realistic option. My friend was even more irritated by this when I pointed out that the iPod DSP can play WMAs, but Apple disables that. He also found iTunes frustrating to use. When he first ran it, it imported his music for him, and he started getting hard drive out of space errors. He didn't realize that iTunes didn't move his music, or create pointers to it, the software made duplicate copies of all his music. The thought of re-ripping his WMA music into MP3 or AAC didn't appeal to him.
He had put a screen protector on iPod immediately after purchasing it, but didn't clean the screen first, and a hair was trapped under the screen protector. The screen protector left behind adhesive when removed, and when my friend tried to buff it out using a soft cotton cloth, the iPod screen was immediately scratched "all to hell" as he put it. Now, certainly his experience isn't the norm given how well the iPod is selling, but I found it somewhat refreshing to see that I'm not the only person who thinks not everything about the iPod is sheer perfection. ;-)
This is a rather entertaining, but certainly controversial article, especially if you're an iPod fan. The 309 comments posted to the article would seem to indicate that it touched a few nerves. ;-) I'll add my own story to this topic: a friend of mine went out and bought a 30GB iPod Video a few days ago. We talked about why he bought it, and after a few days he ended up returning it. Why? He had a mixture of MP3s and WMAs, and the iPod won't play WMAs. No, importing the WMAs and transcoding them so they sound like crap isn't a realistic option. My friend was even more irritated by this when I pointed out that the iPod DSP can play WMAs, but Apple disables that. He also found iTunes frustrating to use. When he first ran it, it imported his music for him, and he started getting hard drive out of space errors. He didn't realize that iTunes didn't move his music, or create pointers to it, the software made duplicate copies of all his music. The thought of re-ripping his WMA music into MP3 or AAC didn't appeal to him.
He had put a screen protector on iPod immediately after purchasing it, but didn't clean the screen first, and a hair was trapped under the screen protector. The screen protector left behind adhesive when removed, and when my friend tried to buff it out using a soft cotton cloth, the iPod screen was immediately scratched "all to hell" as he put it. Now, certainly his experience isn't the norm given how well the iPod is selling, but I found it somewhat refreshing to see that I'm not the only person who thinks not everything about the iPod is sheer perfection. ;-)
