In Which I Compare My Old iPod With My New iPod

Some evil genius who works for Apple managed to invent an entire line of devices that become indispensible in your life almost immediately, cost like $300, and, like clockwork, break every three years. Then when you go to see if they can fix it they either say that they can't or that it will cost $150. Either way, you might as well just get a new one because they get better all the time. So, for the second time since I digitized my music collection, my iPod broke.

I don't want to hear from you about how you still have the iPod with the 4 buttons on top and it still works great. I take my iPod everywhere and I listen to it all day. I go running with it and I have it in my car and it gets a lot of general wear every day. I take care of it, but there's just an unavoidable depreciation that it goes through (that's probably not a good context for "depreciation") every day. But at the same time, there's no reason that it should simply stop working after a couple years. The Apple "genius" (seriously, Apple?) went on and on about how the iPod classic just has a regular hard drive and those moving parts just won't hold up to that wear and tear. I never had a walkman or discman break like this and there are a billion more moving parts in those.

Anyhow (see what i mean), I had to get a new iPod and there were many reasons why it seemed to make sense that I should get an iPod touch instead of a classic iPod. First is that the "genius" (for the love of Christ) was going on and on about the moving parts thing and how an iTouch uses flash memory and has no moving parts and will stand up better to the everyday use. I don't know if I believe that line of bullshit as the iTouch seems a lot more fragile, but it definitely doesn't have any moving parts, so I guess there's something to it. Also the iTouch is just cooler, isn't it. And since I'm 31 and married and have a kid and I've managed to hold down a job for 7 years now, I just have to take cool wherever I can get it. (I totally understand the 55 year olds in Corvettes now, by the way.)

So you'd think the iTouch must be better than the classic iPod in every conceivable way, wouldn't you, but, surprisingly, that's not the case. There are some things about it that are indsiputably amazing, but there are some minor annoying things that just bug me about it. First of all, it won't charge in my car. If I plug it in to the thing that's supposed to pump the songs through the radio and simultaneously charge it, it pops up a message that says chargin is not supported for some reason. So it does play the music on the radio, but it does not cahrge. I never had to think about my Classic charging because it was plugged into my car so often that it would always be at full charge. Now I have to worry about if it's charged or not before I leave the house or actually bring the charger with me and charge it at work or wherever. That's fucking ghetto.

Secondly, you can only work the thing by actually toucing the screen and interacting with the interface. It sounds stupid to say that you have to touch the iTouch to make it work, but it's really annoying. I can't just reach into my pocket and replay or skip a song. I have to take it out of my pocket, press the button, unlock the screen, and then do whatever I want to do. And you obviously have to look at the screen to do it, so it's far more difficult to do while driving. Or just sitting, for that matter.

Additionally, there is this feature where you can shake the iTouch to make it shuffle the music. This falls under the "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" category. I don't see why anyone would need to use this feature. Plus, unless you disable it, it mistakes anything for shaking. Things like, ahh, walking, or slipping into your shirt pocket. Until I realized what was going on and disabled it I had to take the thing out of my pocket in order to unshuffle it every ten steps. Freakin' stupid.

Also, I ended up getting only the 32GB model when i really should have gotten the 64GB model. I was only using 30GB on my classic, but I really need more room to expand, especially with the much greater video capabilities of this one. Really lacked foresight there, though it was also $100 more expensive, which is obviously why I didn't get it in the first place. The classic is less expensive and now only comes in a 160GB model, which is clearly more space than I need. I can't imagine who would need that much space on a Classic iPod with inferior video capabilities.

The one thing that does make this far far far cooler than a classic iPod is the applications, or "apps" as the kids are calling them these days. There are tons of free apps for cool games or any other sort of thing. Also you can pay for apps I guess, though I have yet to, and probably won't. And the video quality is way better with the bigger screen and everything. It's also much easier to navigate through the video section in the Touch than with the Classic. The apps alone really do a lot in terms of balancing out the bad things, but those minor differences are really really annoying on a day to day basis.