More Reasons to Hate I-Pods
Medium turned ten and wanted an MP3 player for her birthday. So my choices are the Zen Nano 1G and the I-Pod Shuffle 1G. Both comparably priced, both come in pink. As you probably have discerned from the title, I’m not an I-Pod guy. I’m also not a Mac Guy. Her stepfather is a Mac and all things Apple guy, and since she spends more of her time with him, and more of her allowance on his computer, I figured I’d bite the bullet and buy her the I-Pod.
So we come back from our trip to the Adirondacks and the little bundle of joy is waiting for us, and Medium is eager to load it up out of the 4 or so gig’s of music that she and Large have accumulated on my hard drive. Large says I have to install I-tunes first. Ha! I think to myself, I’ve already done that. Clicking on, it tells me there’s a newer, better and free version.
Wanting Medium to have the best possible experience, I start downloading the new version. This takes a while. Finally, everything’s loaded, I restart the computer and should be good to go. Oh no… there’s a glitch with my audio configuration, and I have to uninstall quicktime and then reinstall it. This takes quite a few more minutes.
Let me interject here that I was tired and grumpy from driving five hours before I began this journey into Apple Hell. I should have known a foray into the ultra-proprietary MacKingdom wouldn’t be simple.
Then the computer can’t find the little nipper. Okay….. nothing in the instructions told me to pull out the little plastic thingie, it had to figure that one out myself. So, Medium picks out the American Idiot folder. (Which makes me proud) I try to drag it onto the I-Pod icon. No go.
I try to drag the folder into her I-tunes library. No go. At this point I start openly PG-13 cursing I-Tunes, I-Pods and everything Apple. I start to pull out my hair and curse the moment of weakness in which I ordered the I-Pod instead of the Zen, which would have been loaded to its little 1G gills in minutes.
Perhaps fearing her father’s early death, Large ushers me out of the room.
“We’ll just do it at Mom’s house dad” she says, rubbing my back. “It just makes more sense on a Mac.”
Yeah. Whatever.
Comment!
Is this hatred of all things Apple unreasonable?
I gave my brother a 30g ipod a while back and spent 2+ hours on the phone with him the other night working through issues so, yeah, it can be a pain. However, iTunes is a pretty nice app for managing music - better than the junk that comes with most other players. I’ve never seen it fail to recognize an iPod before…
Your kid needs to watch out for another gotcha. After she loads up her ipod with music on the Apple, if she plugs it into your PC, ITunes is going to want to erase the IPod. The reason is that Apple doesn’t want you to use an IPod to move music from one computer to another, to avoid the dreaded pirates. She’ll get a warning before the erasure, but there’s basically no easy way to treat an iPod as a usb drive. There are work-arounds, but they’re a PITA.
Aughhhhhhh.
cute kid. I still don’t have an ipod, mostly for the exact reasons you guys have listed. I picked up a phone a year ago threw in a 1 gig memory card and thats been my music player. Unfortunately being my first experience with a touch screen in my pocket… well I’ll start by saying don’t leave a touch screen in your pocket. It’s all sorts of r-rated cursing now. I’m thinking about going to overly complex phone route again, this time I’m looking at the S-E w910i, 4 gig built in for under $250 so about the same as a 4 gig ipod, but with a phone, and for way less than an iphone although those did just drop in price.
apple would be great if it wasn’t for the super-proprietary nature of all their stuff.
Peace