A Pilgrim’s Digression

Posted by Hello
My iPod arrived Thursday of last week. Unfortunately, my blog has been on hiatus since then, though not for any particular reason. I am very happy with my iPod. The picture above is not great, but I wanted to show as much as possible what it was like to open the box. The box itself was a plain, brown box, with the words “Genuine Apple Refurbished Product” on the side and top. For $291.00, I got a refurbished 30 GB iPod, a remote, a dock, a firewire cable, an AC adapter, earbuds, and an Apple-brand iPod case. I also got a disk with Musicmatch jukebox on it, which tells me that my iPod must have originally been sold as a PC iPod. Anyway, it’s in a Mac household now, right where it belongs and will be happiest.

The iPod itself is pristine. When I took it out of the box for the first time, the metal on the reverse side was so shiny and slick, I could have used it as a shaving mirror. It would be an expensive shaving mirror, but nonetheless the thought did cross my mind, if only fleetingly. The irony is that now I have an iPod with a hard drive bigger than both my computers combined. I have an iBook and iMac at home, both of them getting long in the tooth at this point. The iMac is the elder machine; we bought it in summer 2000. It’s an iMac 400 Mhz DV Special Edition. Nothing so special about it these days, but it still works for me. The iBook is a May 2001 Dual USB iBook, the first in the white iBook line. The iMac has a 12 GB hard drive, and the iBook only has a 10 GB hard drive. Theoretically, I could completely back up both hard drives to my iPod and still have space to spare. The age of my computers might be surprising, except that they are Macs. When people judge Apple Computer based on its paltry market share, one factor not often considered is that Mac Folk don’t upgrade as often as PC folk. We don’t need to upgrade as often. My two Macs still work well for me. I could never play any recent games on them; that is, if I played games. But for Word processing and Internet, they still run like champs. The hard drives could be larger. That is my only complaint. On the flip side, my PC-using step-brother buys a new HP or Dell every two years or so. I don’t know that it is necessary for PC users to upgrade as often as that, but it does seem a common trait among that breed of computer users.

So I passed the weekend ripping CDs and purchasing music from iTunes. I even bought a couple audiobooks from Audible. One can buy Audible books via iTunes, but I’d rather buy direct from the Audible site. Audible allows one to re-download purchased items at any time, as many times as one desires. iTunes makes no such allowance, which I have always thought is a fault of the Apple music store. If I lose my music from a hard drive crash, I ought to be able to go back to iTunes and re-download the music I bought there. As it is, I back up my purchased music routinely, in addition to the “backup” on my iPod. But still, it would be nice to know that Apple is looking out for me, too, in case of data loss.

So what am I listening to on my iPod now, as I write? I am listening to an audiobook, “The Classic Fifty Poems.” Specifically, I am listening to Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Afterwards, I may listen to the Beatles. I ripped all my Beatles CDs and organized the songs according to year of release, so I am looking forward to about five hours of listening to the Beatles from “Love Me Do” through “The Long and Winding Road” in 1970 (the original version, not the new version with the orchestra removed).

Oh, and I did indeed name my iPod Brian.