iFail
I am pretty sure I had the very first MP3 player ever: It was around 1998 when I was flipping through a magazine and stumbled across this thing called a Rio PMP 300. I didn’t even know what an MP3 was at the time. It claimed to hold an album, but I remember for a fact it only held about eight songs.
People now carry around devices that hold 4,000 songs or more. And I was excited to tote eight songs around with me at one time! I can guarantee you that one of the eight was “Back in Black,” because I hold the theory that everyone has that track on their iPod. I think I dropped $200 on this stupid player. Don’t think that because I work in radio, I hate this addition to the digital medium; I’ve been a fan from the get-go. I think the MP3 player is a convenient gizmo, but it doesn’t interact with humans very well. If you really think about the darn thing, it’s quite frustrating.
The reason I know that iPods, in particular, are frustrating is because people ask me to program theirs all the time. People don’t like programming their own. When there is no element of surprise, people get bored. Playlists have to change all the time, and people, by nature, are too lazy to do the work required to keep an iPod freshly entertaining. The equivalent of a stale iPod would be a TV station that only aired Mash, Cheers, Friends, and Seinfeld. We all love those shows, but at some point, they run their course. Similarly, iPod playlists lose their charm…fast.
It’s quite similar to that feeling you get when you stand in the middle of your closet looking for something new that isn’t there or expect new food to magically appear in your fridge. Buying new music every month is only realistic for professional athletes and Kardashians. I think it would be a lot easier and more effective to continuously swap iPods with friends than it would be to constantly program an entertaining iPod.
In chatting with people about their iPods I know one thing for certain: The earbuds just plain suck. For the longest time, I thought I had Alien Ears unlike any other human on Earth. My runs would consist of me constantly putting my headphones back in or trying to remain so stiff while running that it appeared as if I was trying to balance an invisible book on my head. For all we spend on the latest Nano, do the headphones really have to be so cheap? They kind of stay in your ears for the first week until you lose the little foam covers. Have you tried to replace the little foam covers? I have. You would think the Apple Store would have a bin full of them by the entrance. They don’t.
My wife hunted them down. Her only solution was to order them in bulk from Hong Kong. A massive case of them showed up at our house. We literally have thousands of them; through the winter we used them for kindling. Yes, you can get custom earbuds made, but some are priced near $400. I’d rather listen to traffic.
I have so many questions that continue to go unanswered: Should my head- phones go in front of me or behind me when I go for a run? Should it go inside or outside my shirt? Why do people go for a run together if they are going to wear iPods? Are they that uninterested in each other? Why do people not understand that headphones in the gym are the universal signal for “I don’t want to talk anyone”? How many more chargers, cradles, and cables can I possibly have in my house? Why aren’t the new devices compatible to charge with my Bose docking station or my in-car system that I spent a lot of money on?
If I sound bitchy, it’s just that I, like many of you, have purchased so many iterations of these devices over the years. How long before we just say “No more!”? It’s no wonder that in an Apple survey the most requested add-on was an FM Tuner.
And now? They want us all to spend a minimum of $500 on an iPad. I’m going to need a new armband to go for a jog with that.
In the time I’ve spent fiddling with iPods over the past decade, I could have learned to play the music myself.
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