Against the iPod

It’s so completely uncool to not like the iPod. But I’m putting myself out there as someone who feels very ambivalent about it. It’s so very easy to call our the typical adulations for the product — it’s sleek, it’s fast, it works, it’s Apple.
But here are my summer-cold-fueled negatives on the product — negatives which I have never seen previously:

  • The iPod separates us from the very physical reality that we inhabit. It’s similar of course to the now 25-year-old Walkman but the iPod makes it far too easy for a person to ignore, or worse, sneer at, the concrete.
  • The iPod holds too much music. I know that more is more when it comes to technology. But no one should have access to that many songs in one’s pocket; there’s something grotesque about the millions of hours of musical arrangement and production being reduced to a tiny replay apparatus.
  • The iPod, despite Apple’s best attempt at creating an integrated and legal music store, by its nature encourages the illegal downloading of music. ‘Nuff said.
  • The white ear buds on the iPod are ugly, inhuman, and unworkable. For some reason, the white color of the buds on any skin color looks horrendous, fetid, silly.
  • The iPod’s streamlined design and button functionality has nothing to do with music, musical instruments, or the history of musical recording, playback, or re-authoring.

Boy, I’m glad to get that off my chest. Now if I could just do the same thing with this cold.

5 thoughts on “Against the iPod”

  1. Maybe the iPod itself lends to illegal downloading, but the iTunes Music Store sure is pretty slick. It’s faster than illegal downloading, and its files are of a consistently high quality. At first I thought “What? A buck a song? Lame!” Then I started downloading them, and there’s no going back. Illegal downloading is on the way out. Don’t worry.

  2. illegal downloading is a good thing? do you have a clue what you’re talking about? do you think it’s ok to steal? if you ever created something, a painting or a song or a sculpture or a poke, or whatever, and then it was taken from you and you had no control over your own creation, wold that be ok? people who say illegal downloaing is ok just don’t know what they are talking about. they have neither a conscience nor a clue. i’m not defending the record companies. i am defending artists, and not just rich rock stars. but any artist who has created something. artists deserve the right to do what they want with their art. taking that art from them without compensating them in any way is wrong, perion, end of discussion.

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