Dec 03 2008
My new old iPod came today
It’s engraved with a simple concept: “Must be the season of the rich, yeah,” because why else would I spend close to two hundred bucks to buy yet another over-priced product, particularly when I already have 26 Macs, an Apple TV, and a half dozen iPods?
Well, seriously now. It’s obvious why people buy Apple products. It’s because they work, and even when they don’t, Apple spends time and effort fixing them so they do work. Apple is seldom stupid when it comes to product development.
This is not to say that products that depend on Microsoft for their applications do not work. In fact, I suspect that the challenge of getting Microsoft crap to work is the chief allure of the platform for the mainframe geezers and the potential shut-ins among the gun-deprived teenagers and pre-teens who don’t really want to kill their own parents but — by golly — if the bungholes next door keep acting like Demopublicans or Republicrats or whatever the current political rage is, they wouldn’t really lose much sleep over blowing the entire genealogy away and let God mourn about it.
You know where God stands on this position? I don’t. I haven’t been able to contact the office of God for more than 50 years for comment. Perhaps someone out there has a number or e-mail address I can use to talk with one of God’s staff workers, who many of my pierced and tattooed acquaintances refer to as “minions” or “horny knee-pad toting interns.”
You know why I bought this iPod? Because I could. I had the money already in an account, and my wife and I are both Sagittarians, and Apple offered specials on White Friday, so I bought it because it meant I didn’t have to worry about being trampled by idiots, along with a couple of adapters to run the MacBook I bought last White Friday for $800 into the flat screen, a microphone to start doing podaphysical outpatient clinic posts for the imagination challenged, and a remote to keep me from kicking my foot through the components of our “home entertainment” system.
The Classic has 120 GBs, which is three times what I have on the Apple TV, which has yet to disappoint in living up to its promise. My old iPod is a first or second generation mini hard drive version that recently began giving errors that I was exceeding the 40 GB capacity. Imagine that.
My original Mac had a 400K floppy, and I just installed an upgrade to a program on download that required 238 MB. Imagine that.
I haven’t tried the Snowflake microphone yet, but I’m happy with the iPod.
I’ll be able to record thoughts on this machine when I’m out working at my wage slave job or fishing or mushroom hunting or driving to and from those human activities, and I’ll be able to edit those recordings with the built-in software of the Mac OS.
It’s time that I begin decommissioning the PPOCLL Macintosh Museum and contributing it to people who can’t afford the latest technology and should not be expected to purchase the most expensive options available. If I wasn’t so jaded by speed and convenience, I could get by with one of the SEs. I do occasionally fire it up to get a buzz from the bold imaginary cures for the Reagan and Gingrich pandemics.
But that doesn’t mean that the 20% of the population that is not wealthy enough to through away money on entertainment devices should not be aware of good user interfaces and software implementations that are designed to make technology easy to use and expand demand through the understanding and promotion of designs that promote reasonable user experiences. Technology is not by definition an evil to be avoided, condemned, or destroyed, no more than religion is. They are the same thing.
My existing iTunes and iPhoto libraries are being added to the new iPod in the background as I type this. I’ve tried the process on several Windows machines with the same or similar products, and the only thing I have been confident to expect is that it won’t work the first time, and whatever went wrong, it’s not Microsoft’s fault. Microsoft is neither technology nor religion. It simply is a skin tag in the arm pit of the NOMPH.
Tomorrow I will recount my favorite Microsoft Technical Support encounter from the late 1980s. I have no idea if things are as bad today as they were then, because I avoid Microsoft products whenever I can. I’m not an idiot. How about you?
