No Socks - But a Really Cool Toy
Hope you all had a great holiday weekend. I found that having Christmas fall on Monday was like filing for an extension to file a tax return - I had two extra days to shop and otherwise get my act together. I finished shopping Saturday, then on Sunday, we finally got our tree up.
We tend to roll out Christmas day at a pretty leisurely pace. Since the rest of my side of the family is in the eastern time zone, there used to be a good chance they’d call and perhaps spill some important information before we’d even made our coffee and gotten limber enough to crawl on the floor to plug the tree in. That’s not so likely now that children are grown, and seldom seen about the house on a weekend morning, and now that my brothers are, quite frankly, getting old.
I got many lovely gifts, including a gift certificate that will nudge us up to Orcas Island sometime, some nice wine, a favorite fruitcake. One of them, however, perhaps the biggest one, presented a dilemma - an iPod video 80gb. I unwrapped the packages - the player, the docking station, some accoutrement for car & travel - and was a little stunned. I’ve never owned anything Apple, and only ever touched an iPod once or twice. The unopened boxes almost hummed with mystery and temptation. However, I already have an mp3 player with a 40gb drive (a Creative Zen Xtra) and I’ve been happy with it. But…but…it doesn’t have a color display; it doesn’t render video; or photographs; it’s 3 times as big as the iPod. But..but..I need reading glasses to dial my cell phone - how much good will a 2.5 inch video screen do me? I could get something really cool from Best Buy in exchange.
But…I kept looking at those boxes, and imagined opening them and being whisked into the main channel. See, I’ve owned 2 mp3 players, the Creative and an Archos that died from poor construction and being French. With both purchases, I considered the comparable iPod, and the value proposition, the significantly lower cost for more capacious players, won me over. Then I’d go into Best Buy and see racks of cool doodads made just for the iPod; I’d shop for music on iTunes and feel like a second-class citizen since I couldn’t get the tunes onto my mp3 player without burning a cd and then ripping it back.
So, about an hour after removing the wrapping paper and dithering, I caved to the seduction of the thing itself, and the legitimating ethos it would confer upon me, and opened the box. I’ve been having a great time ever since. I finally became privy to the secrets of the clickwheel. And the color display is dazzling. And iTunes now welcomes me like a Yale legacy instead of like a public-school poseur. Life is good.
