Feeling the Dark Side's Power Flow Through Me

Well, it happened. I asked for - and received - an iPod for Christmas. This may sound like a pretty lame thing for a twenty-something blogger and tech nerd to be exited about writing about, but it is very nearly a watershed event in my life. Maybe not quite that epic, but I think it says something. Ever since our family got our first Packard-Bell 386 computer (complete with 2x CD-ROM drive and oooh 256-color VGA monitor), I have always been an ardent and vocal supporter of the "IBM" or "PC" style computer, as opposed to Apple stuff, like iMacs and iBooks and whatever else.

I'm a nerd, but I never reached the level of spurning Windows to use Unix or Linux or anything like that. But I certainly enjoyed the fact that I had mastered DOS back in the day - it was something I took pride in and knew that I had at least a basic level of understanding of what went on behind the scenes of all the pretty pictures and graphics in Windows. I think that was where my hatred of all things Apple began...it was not so much that I thought that it was a bad product or that it wasn't useful, it was that I believed it encouraged people to not think about what their computer was doing. It simplified things to the point of rediculousness. ONE mouse button! How the hell do you call up the properties menu? Is there a properties menu? What do you mean you don't know how to access your hard drive? It made me mad that people delighted in the simpicity of everything. They didn't have to know text commands to "cls" or "md FAVORI~1" or adjust COM ports to make your Sound Blaster (or equivalent) sound card work or make a boot disk or pound your keyboard in frustration when Doom said there was an IRQ error or any of the fun stuff!

But of course that was the point. People don't want to have to worry about that stuff. People don't want to have to worry about IRQ addresses. They want to hit a button, have a pretty picture pop up with a status bar to tell you that the computer is working on stuff, and then hit one big mouse button to play solitaire or whatever other crappy games they offered for the Mac. And there's nothing wrong with that. That statement is what took me 15 years to come to terms with. People want things to work right because they have enough other shit in their lives to worry about and enough other tasks taking up their time without having to worry about whether or not they'll get a Blue Screen of Death and have to reboot and rewrite that entire Christmas letter they just spent two hours they'll never get back on.

Now that I'm older and I have a real job and significantly less free time, I understand that. When I was a kid, I happily spent entire summers fucking with COM ports and memory allocation to make Duke Nukem 3d run well without having to listen to MIDI music. I have to admit, nowadays I get frustrated as all hell when my MLB 2005 game has a direct 3d error or locks up, because now I'm wasting my valuable free time fixing my computer, instead of enjoying it.

So, to bring things back to my original point, it is an event for me that I am excited about and thoroughly enjoying my Apple iPod. Just like the literally millions of other people out there with the same damn thing. I am now a statistic - there is absolutely nothing that distinguishes my iPod from any of the others out there. But I don't care. It is fucking awesome. Here's why:

1. It looks awesome.
2. It feels awesome - heavy enough to let you know its built decently well, but not obtrusive or bulky.
3. The interface is awesome. You push the buttons just hard enough and they immediately respond with a click and the thing does what you want it to do. Brilliant.
4. It holds ALL of my songs and still has room for more. All 98G of my songs.
5. It has games on it that don't absolutely blow.
6. It synched with my iTunes, charged, and worked perfectly the first time I used it.
7. It sounds pretty good.
8. I can manually drag and drop songs to and from it from Windows Explorer. Makes me feel like I retain a little bit of control over the damn thing.

So, call me boring or call me a bandwagoner or whatever - I've already called myself all of those things. I don't care. It is the bomb. Kudos, Steve Jobs. You did a hell of a lot better than Dell did when it tried to make an MP3 player.