Love My iPod
posted Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 by Jason Eaton
Has there ever been a moment that you can recollect, almost as if it were frozen in time, when you realized that technology was about to change your life forever? There’s one such moment that tops my list – the day my iPod’s true potential finally sunk in. It was late November 2001 and I was in Annapolis, explaining to a friend what this shiny white brick could do. As I was extolling its virtues it suddenly hit me: this simple little device is going to change, already is changing, the way I experience an entire category of entertainment.
Now, before I go any further, I want to put this into context for you. I’m a self-aware geek, about 32-years-old, with a sizable music collection. I received my first cd player in 1986, and spent all my waking hours (and all the money that wasn’t required to sustain life) on music.
Over the course of the next 15 years, the collection grew like a well-tended garden, but as that garden began to strain at the fences I began to fantasize about a music delivery system that could hold the whole collection, and at the same time make it convenient to access. In those days, the closest you could get were those cd carousels that hold hundreds of discs. But they were flaky and couldn’t deal with vinyl and DAT tapes. I mean, sure, there was that brief but torrid affair with Minidiscs with their 80-minute playlists (mmmmm, playlists), but set-up was a royal pain.
Back to 2001: I was standing on a brick-paved street, showing my friend how I had loaded every single album, single, demo, and concert I had by “The Cure” into my iPod (which sadly filled the hard drive). It was then I realized that within the next five to ten years, I’d be able to carry around every single audio recording I owned in a small sleek machine just like this, and it stunned me.
The next three years were an industrious blur of transferring everything I had into iTunes, transitioning to a 30Gb 3G (which I dropped while scootering) and finally the 40Gb 4G I have today. Here I am, in 2006, with almost 250Gb of music at my fingertips. I no longer have a wall of cds wasting tons of space in the living room (the iMac that runs the house’s iTunes library lives in the basement.) I no longer have a giant rack of media players, and can simply beam music via Apple’s Airport Express through my TV’s speakers. I am still looking to the day when the iPod itself matches or exceeds my collection’s capacity, and am truly impressed when I reflect on how my (now humble) 4G has become an indispensable fixture in my life.
In the morning, the iPod docks with an IceLink in my car, and eases my commute to work. Once there, it docks with my Mac G5 and becomes a hard drive bridge for files to travel between work and home. During the course fo the day, playlists are built and modified for the commute home. The iPod plays me home, and once there will either help me cope with mowing the lawn, or will dock with the Powerbook for file transfers.
What strikes me most about my iPod is how I completely take it for granted. It works tirelessly in the background and does exactly what I need it to. I believe this to be the mark of all truly great technology – that you can take it for granted and yet couldn’t live without it. It accomplishes exactly what it was designed to do in that delightfully crucial and invisible way so many of Apple’s products do.
My emotional attachments to electronics tend to be fickle, and to be perfectly honest, it’s my secret hope that some of my gear will fail just so I can replace it. But for some reason, I have loved and continue to love my iPod. And though I look forward to eventually getting the color/video version, I’m still so smitten with the 4G I got way back in 2001 that I’m in no particular rush to see that day come. I can’t say that about any other piece of electronics I own.
It must be love.
