Dear Apple: no.

The new iPod Shuffle. It's probably the prettiest thing I've seen in my life. Unfortunately, it is crap.

Removing the buttons sounds pretty stupid. They almost did it right, with the buttons being on the headphones. But oh no, you're stuck with the shitty stock headphones! Some other company will make an adaptor, right?

Well, almost. You remember those "authorization chips" that accessories for the iPod Classic/other iPods of that era need to work? Apple is now putting those in the headphones. We can essentially expect $10 headphone adaptors that cost 3¢ to make because Apple is being a shit. Anyone who's read this blog before knows I love Apple, but you'd have to be a pretty huge Macfag to not see what's wrong here.

Windows 7

Finally, they're getting it right. After six major Windows versions, there's now one I want. It runs well on weak hardware, it's more stable, it's basically got the qualities that made me switch to OS X.

So will I stay on OS X with future computers? Depends on whether or not Apple can top them. They'll sure-as-peas try, because you know how Apple is. I'm definitely getting me a copy of Windows 7 when it's out, though. And I do mean I'm getting one as soon as I can, because Microsoft has made it pretty apparent that they don't want to lose any more users to Mac, so they're really stepping up. You probably know of how they're beta-testing it. If you don't, they're giving a public beta to everyone who wants one. There's millions of beta testers. It can't fail. I haven't gotten the beta though. This is because I don't want to go through installing it (plus my computer doesn't have a DVD burner for to burn the disc image) and I can wait for the final, perfected version. I'll have to clear up quite a bit of hard drive space for it, though. Maybe I'll get a second external drive.

I think I'm going to hold of getting a netbook even longer so I can get one with Windows 7. It'll be a little while, but the wait will pay off when they're pumping out cheap netbooks running Windows 7 at good speeds. Maybe I'll get an iPod Touch to hold myself off for now. That isn't a bad idea. 

Next I'd like to see a Windows 7-esque version of Windows Mobile. Aren't we on version 6 right now anyway? It'd make sense. And if it lives up to the name, then on top of a Windows version I'd want, they'd also have out a mobile OS I'd consider.

And since we're talking about Microsoft, isn't the Zune great? I have no idea why people don't like them. They're just as good, if not better than iPods (though I say the Zune 120 beats the iPod Classic). If I wasn't a Mac user (or if the Zune worked on Macs) I'd probably have gotten the Zune 80 (as it was known at the time) instead of an iPod Classic. After the installation of Windows 7 though I probably still won't get one. It's unfortunate, but I pretty much decided that if I get a new MP3 player, it'd be an iPod Touch.

Whoever says iPods aren't durable is stupid

Or at least new iPods. Chances are, you know of my iPod Classic 80gb. Today while at the mall I dropped it due to trying to change songs without putting a coffee down. Now I have dropped it before, a few times on cement, but those times it was in the iPod sock. This time it was fully unsocked. Not only does it still fully work (as opposed to breaking open, freezing, exploding, liquifying, or doing anything else that an iPod-hater would tell you), but it suffered no cosmetic damage. I'm not exaggerating. When I spend a lot of money on something, I tend to be kind of crazy about keeping it working and retaining it's out-of-the-box beauty. I looked it over on all sides maybe four times and it didn't seem to have suffered any significant scratches on the back, and the whole front, screen and all, were still totally intact. Anyone who says iPods break easily is either stupid or stuck in the past (when they did break easily).

Oh and while we're on the subject, the battery is not guaranteed to die forever after a year and a half of use. My girlfriend's 4th gen, black and white iPod died recently. To my understanding, it was pretty old. The screen was more worn out than the battery. But it didn't die on account of the battery, it died due to a hard drive failure. Anyone who tells you that iPods are a ripoff because of that is pretty stupid.

The new iPod Nano, my first impression

Today I got to stop by the Apple store and use the new Nanos (also iPod Touches). I had a pretty good time. The employees were very kind as usual. As you'd expect, this post is about the new Nano. So instead of filling your face with random useless info (I walked to Cold Stone Creamery and got some ice cream and it was good), I'm gonna get right to it.

It feels VERY good in the hand. It's very light (but still not too light) and thin. The curved edges definitely help to make it feel smaller. I probably spent a total of four minutes just fondling them and getting high off the colors. Speaking of the colors, my favorites on the Nanos would be silver (the black click wheel made it look a lot less basic and a lot more hell-yes), blue, and green. The build quality was probably the best of any iPod I've used yet. To put an end to this paragraph, it looks and feels very good in the hand (the curved click wheel wasn't annoying at all, despite my expectations).

So how's the interface on that awkward long screen? Really good. The spacious menus made navigating much easier. They also smoothed over all the animations, such as that sliding animation between screens. I definitely prefer it to the interface of previous iPods.

Cover flow was very good on the new Nano. It's definitely something I would use. From anywhere under "Music" you can turn the iPod on it's side and get to it. If you do it on the Now Playing screen, there's also an animation that rotates the album art 180º and shrinks it into cover flow. Then you scroll.

I like that because it's a nice way to get right from Now Playing to scrolling by album. The accelerometer is responsive and quick, so there is hardly any turn-and-wait. You do have to turn it a pretty good amount though, but that's actually a good thing because it prevents accidental-cover flow. And cover flow has really been improved over what was in the previous iPods. Album art loads much faster and there is a lot less lag. The animations are smoother and scrolling is much easier. You can also scroll by letter by scrolling very fast, which I found to be very useful. And I know it wasn't like that just from the store having a small library, because on the new Classics it is still just as laggy and slow as ever, and all the iPods in the store have the same content on them. So essentially they took something that was totally useless before and made it pretty great. Something you might not know though is that when it's rotated, the buttons on the click wheel don't rotate their functions. So Menu is on the left, fast forward is on the top, rewind is on the bottom, and play/pause is on the right. It's not nearly as awkward as you'd think, though.

By the way, the new Now Playing screen is very pretty. I like the big album art covering the top, it looks very good (though I bet it looks kinda ugly when you play songs that don't have the art) and how they fit everything else on bottom without making it look cramped. Text is small, but readable. Animations (such as when you press the center button to change functions) are smooth here as well. I also like how they worked in Genius. For those who don't know, holding down the center button while on Now Playing brings up a menu on the top where you can choose to add that song to the On-the-Go Playlist or make a Genius playlist out of it) The Nano gets an A+.

And while I'm here, I'll say a few words about the other new iPods. The Classic is pretty pointless, as I've said before. Plus, it's an insult to everyone who owns the old Classic (me). Despite the nice improvements in the iPod Nano, you don't get any interface changes (no smooth animations), cover flow is still useless (I know it doesn't have an accelerometer, but they could have smoothed the animations and given it letter-scrolling), Genius seems out of place (if you hold the button on Now-Playing you don't get a pretty menu on top, it takes you to a whole new menu where you can't see the now-playing screen where you then choose what you want to do with that song), and it has support for the remote feature on the new iPod in-ear headphones. Why's the last one bad? Those of us with the old Classic (which is essentially exactly the same) are taunted with more (for us 80gbers) space and the headphone support and the lazy addition of Genius for the same money we paid for our 80gb iPods, and those with 160gb now have a less valuable iPod because the 120 is closer to 160 for the same cash the 80 once was. That sounds stupid, but when you pay $350 for an MP3 player, you want it to retain value for a while. Plus, the 160gbers, even if they're OK with paying another $250 for the unexciting new Classic, lose 40gb of space. I think we would've been better off if the Classic was left alone and if the new headphones used an adapter or something to connect through the dock connector (that way everyone with a recent iPod could use the remote).

The touch is cool. It's not super different from the old one. The thinness is very noticeable though. It's extremely thin. The back looks neat with the curved edges. It's pretty much the same as the old one, except for the built in Nike+iPod and the speaker. Oh yeah, and the speaker hardly makes it worth getting to replace a current touch. I guess it would be convenient if you forgot your headphones and wanted to put it right in your ear, but otherwise it has little purpose.

Things I think would make the iPod better

So I've owned an iPod (80gb Classic) for maybe six months now and it's been great. It's convenient, easy to use, and so far I haven't had any problems (other than the infamous problem with the Classics and the click wheel not being very responsive) with it. Great as it is, I think it could be a bit better.

One thing I'd really like to see would be an "Advanced" mode. The iPod as it is, is very user friendly and doesn't present any complicatedness that would cause confusion in someone illiterate. However, I would like a little of that complicatedness. Most specifically I'd like to be able to view statistics of files saved on the iPod. Things like format, bit rate, maybe where you got it from (downloaded on iTunes, from a CD, etc), resolution (in the case of videos and photos) and things of that nature.

I'd also like them to bring back fullscreen album art. Well it wasn't really full screen, but anyone who's used an iPod Video will probably know that among the various functions you can perform when you click the middle button on Now Playing, one of them simply enlarged the album art and made it mostly fit the screen. I thought that was neat, and now they've gotten rid of it.

Another improvement that could be made would be to be able to turn Repeat on or off without going into Settings. It's nice that you can toggle Shuffle from the now playing screen, but I don't know why they left Repeat out of it.

Oh, and DRM kinda sucks. It only happens on iTunes downloads of course, but it's annoying when you want to do something with your downloaded songs. However, Apple has started to do something about it, it's called "iTunes Plus." Basically an iTunes Plus song has double the bit rate of a regular song (256 instead of 128) and no DRM, so you're free to burn it, distribute it, or use it however you want. They also cost the same as a non-Plus song, so everything about it is great. The only thing is, not all their songs are iTunes Plus.

Firewire would be nice too. They slowly started taking away Firewire support a while ago (now you can't even charge with it) and I think that sucks. Firewire is fast. Even though USB has a higher mbps, it can't stay at that mbps most of the time so instead of 480mbps, USB gives you maybe 300 or 200. Firewire stays at a constant 400 (or 800) so it's nice and fast. It's no big deal if you're only syncing over an album or a song, but for big syncs like video and such, Firewire would be nice. And I'm sure that iPhone users and their 2+ hour syncs would also appreciate it.

Anyone who knows iPod history will understand this, we really need more stuff in the box. There was once a time when you got a dock, a remote (it clipped to your shirt and you could control your iPod with it), a case, their awful shitty headphones, and I think an external charger. That was what came with your iPod. And in the day of Firewire you also got both a USB and a Firewire cable. Now you get their awful shitty headphones, a dock insert for your iPod radio, and a USB cord. If the iPod wasn't such a nice player I wouldn't have gotten one for the total lack of stuff in the box.

Bring back the bigger engraved text. On the older iPods (video and before) when you got text engraved it was nice and big. On the Classic it's pretty tiny, and you still have the same size limitations as when it was bigger.

Make the click wheel more responsive. It used to be that you could touch it anywhere and you'd get a response, but on every Classic I've used it's been totally dead in the center and would randomly have other dead spots on and off. Annoying.

Fill the interface with PG-13 content so parents will stop buying them for their spoiled asshole children. I'm being serious.

Give it a radio to shut up the "it doesn't have radio" people. It's not like they'd even listen to it though, since listening to radio somewhat defeats the purpose of the iPod. Then again, those people usually have something against the iPod anyway, so they'd just find something else to not like about it. Maybe we don't need a radio after all.

Those would make the iPod better. Get crackin', Apple.

Portable music player idiocy!

Recently out of boredom I've been answering questions on Yahoo! Answers and noticed quite a bit of portable music player idiocy in the category for portable music players. Since I don't feel like thinking of an intelligent way to word my complaints, I'll just make a list.

- The estimates that you get on how much music an MP3 player can hold are always right. Quite often when people ask questions like which size iPod or Zune would be best, people answer "well, this one can hold 20000 songs, so that will probably be OK maybe." What could possibly cause these people to not notice just how wrong those estimates are? You could argue that they don't understand things like encoders and bit rates, but what about song length? This was something I understood when I was 11 and browsing the Apple site, saying "Oh, those estimates don't make much sense. What about song length?" I didn't even know what a bit rate or an encoder was. It just makes sense.

- iPods and MP3 players are different things. ...What? I'll admit, Yahoo! Answers wasn't the first place I read this. But seriously, what? How the fuck are they different? Are iPods just so almighty and overly trendy that they now are classified as something other than an MP3 player? Yes, I know MP3 isn't even their regular format, but regardless, it plays MP3s, and MP3 player is the common name for "portable music player," hence why I stopped saying that. And don't get pissy if you're an Apple nazi because I said they're overly trendy. I own one, I love it, I love iPods, and they ARE overly trendy. This is fact, and anyone who isn't blind or stupid will tell you that.

- Not being able to figure out something that is so simple, the only way it could be easier would be to retardify it by taking away something important, like needing a computer to put songs on the MP3 player. This means all the people who ask us how to put songs on their iPods. How can you not know how to do that? It tells you in the manual to download iTunes if you don't have it, and just about the only thing you need to use iTunes is an IQ over 80. In fact, after you have it installed all you have to do is plug your iPod in and click "sync." I guess somehow these morons get it in their heads that the manual does not contain any useful information on using the product. But we all know that if we saved a few (continents of) forests by not packing manuals with consumer products, all the people who buy them would be calling in asking where the manual is. People are stupid.

- Not knowing how to put music into iTunes. Yeah, this one should've been in the above one, but I didn't want to cram it full of too many words. And also, you may have noticed that I talk about iPods and iTunes a lot. This is because they're what I have the most experience in, so questions pertaining to those things are the ones I usually click on. Anyway, there are questions like this more often than you'd think. Questions where people ask how to get music into iTunes. What the crap is that? How do you not get music into it? It pulls itself to the front of the screen when you put in a CD and even prompts you on whether or not you want to add it to your library. That's less common though, than people asking how to get music that's already on their computers into it. Apple tries as hard as they can to make it easy on these kinds of people and they still can't figure out how to get an MP3 they got on Limewire into iTunes. For those who don't know iTunes, you drag it. It's just that easy. You drag the song over to the library in iTunes and WHAMO. It's in iTunes. How do these people even figure out how to use Limewire? It's not like it's hard to use, but it's not nearly as user friendly as iTunes is.

And once a guy asked how to replace the battery on an iPod because it went through the washing machine. He somehow thought that the only part damaged was the battery. I'm sure it was damaged, but I have somehow gotten it in my head that even if he replaced it, it still wouldn't turn on. I dunno, it's just one of those feelings.