That's funny. Some high quality prognostication, there.

Too funny.

I got stuck with an iPod mini when I purchased my iBook. Some sort of rebate deal so they charged me for it and promised to refund it. So far, no refund, the bastards.

Anyway, it's pretty cool to have 5Gb of music on one's person. Can pack a whole lotta variety in there, take a while to get bored with the contents.

I'd never buy one willingly, though. Sound quality of the mini sucks donkey, for one. Reliability is suspect; I've already sent it back for warranty service. And while a 512Mb device wouldn't hold a lot of variety, it's not that big a deal to copy new music over, and it'd be one helluva lot smaller a device.

So... meh. iPod, whatever. It's all good.

Apple makes a decent product, but they've been helped a lot by the utterly hapless nature of their competition in this arena. It's like a hundred guys with blindfolds on, running in every direction while Bill Gates frantically yells directions.

I agree with you on the audio quality... it's not the best. I also prefer tactile buttons. On the other hand, I love itunes.

a-ha, silly geeks.

After killing a forty gig (...oops), I sprang for a ten-gig. It is now my third arm. I wind up walking a lot (no car in a walkable city), and it's good to have - pass the time with podcasts, or motivate me with good music.

My 60GB Creative Jukebox Zen is the techno-love of my life. No itunes DRM, works like a drive when attached to my computer, and I have Bob Dobbs on it. Also, I just passed the 7,000 song mark (still ripping from my own CDs so far) and it's only about 1/3rd full.

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

I'm not trying to anger a bunch of zealots here, but I can understand where most of these criticisms came from, and why they seemed reasonable at the time (and, for that matter, why some of them are still reasonable).

When the first iPod came out, there were already HD-based players with larger capacities, and flash-based players that were considerably smaller and lighter. Besides, quite a few people didn't foresee the mass appeal of ITMS (especially right as the RIAA started suing end-users, and a lot of p2p programs either disappeared or became spyware distribution vectors), iTunes integration and the click-wheel interface.

Maybe more importantly, they didn't foresee the cultural impact--the advertising media blitz, the gigantic accessories market, the hipster appeal or the way that a dominant market position threatens to take 'iPod,' the word, to the same place that 'xerox' and 'aspirin' and whatnot occupy.

And, just to hit the trifecta, it seems to be fairly common for geeks to mistake their own priorities for those of consumers as a whole. Some of the same people who were upset that the iPod doesn't play .flac and .ogg also trumpeted the superior video quality of Betamax, and, these days, they expect the Nintendo Revolution to fail because it doesn't support high-definition video.

(I don't have an iPod. I like 'em okay, but I like my iRiver H140 better.)