My New iPod

A while back I broke down and bought myself a new iPod, or rather I should say that my old iPod broke down and forced me to buy a new iPod. The old one, at the tremorous age of five, did everything I needed it to do, playing all the music I could want to hear; the only problem was that its capacity topped out at around 2,000 songs, when I’ve got a lot more than that.

The new one can hold roughly double that, which is good. I haven’t come close to filling it yet. It also stores images of album covers, and displays the corresponding cover for whatever song you’re listening to. This sounds like a neat feature, but I have to say, listening to “Wichita Lineman” is not greatly enhanced by a vision of Glen Campbell crouching down to fill the square canvas that is the cover of All My Best. The old one merely scrawled the song title, artist and album title in Helvetica across a colorless screen, and that was fine. The new screen is so crowded it has to alternate album title and artist name across the bottom, so if you want to know one or the other, you better hope you’re looking at the right time.

I suppose the little screen can also play videos, but I have not tried that yet, and I am not inclined to do so. I have no shortage of opportunities to watch TV, many of them on a screen that is significantly larger than one inch by one inch. Maybe I can download some of those old Alfred Hitchcock Presentses on there.

And there is one major, almost deal-breaking problem with this new iPod. I could charge my old iPod by plugging the firewire cable that came with it into my computer, or into a wall socket with the included adapter. Even better, I could play the iPod on my Paul Harvey-approved Bose dock, and while the music was pumping across the kitchen, the iPod actually charged. I could leave it in there ad nauseum, and it would be ready to rock whenever I wanted to take it for a walk.

No more. The new iPod doesn’t charge with the old adapter. It doesn’t charge in the dock. Consider this: They had to reengineer the thing, taking out whatever old electrical capabilities it once had, in order to make it less useful to me. The only way I can charge it is by plugging it into my computer – only one computer, the one I have my iTunes on. (Or, as I understand it, I can buy a new wall charger to replace to obsolete one.)

I will be traveling most of the next two weeks, away from my home computer. I suspect at some point my iPod will become useless, and I will have to buy a new charger for it. Thanks for nothing, Steve Jobs.