soccerfan said:
I've never really wanted an iPod but everyone seems so incredibly psyched up about this Cram & Jam deal that I'm wondering if I'm missing something...
It's basically just an MP3 player, right?!
What am I missing? What makes it so incredibly cool?
I was like you, when the iPod first came out. I looked at the hype and I sneered. It was just an mp3 player. Sure, it had a harddrive, but so did the Creative Nomad Jukebox, so it's not like they were first on the market or anything. Back then, iPods weren't even particularly tiny. I just couldn't see the allure, especially at $400. I was someone who thought Apple had made a mistake. They'd priced it so much higher than the competition. What the hell was Apple thinking? MP3 players are commodity devices, not lifestyle products.
...then one of my friends at college got one for the spring semester. You cannot understand the allure of an iPod until you've had one full of music sitting in your hand. Everything is designed PERFECTLY. It's like a Platonic ideal of what a music player should be, if we lived in a utopia where dreams could be made material without losing any perfection. Sometimes, it doesn't feel like your iPod was designed for your hand, but that your hand was designed for your iPod. Something about it is just RIGHT. Last May, I drove across Florida with my iPod. It's not like it was the first time I'd used it for an extended period or anything...I mean, I've had it for years. But I started appreciating it on that trip. Not more than I had before, just differently. It's like that every instance you use an iPod. Each time, you fall in love with it all over again.