Luke727's Journal: About iPods.

I've always been content with a portable CD player. Lately I've gotten tired of carrying around extra CDs and a bulky player. I've been contemplating getting an MP3 player, but none of them seem to offer the features I want at my price range. The 20G iPod is $299 and way out of my range. When they announced the 4G iPod Mini I thought this would be the player for me. Unfortunately, it is priced at $249. This completely boggles my mind. The iPod Mini is slightly smaller than the iPod, has a colored skin, and has only 20% of the capacity of a normal iPod. And this constitutes a savings of only $50? What the fuck? Who in their right mind wouldn't spring the extra $50 for the regular iPod with 5 times the capacity? If you can afford to drop $249 on an iPod Mini, surely you can afford to drop $299 on the full-sized iPod. I know the reason for the small price drop is the different hard drive technology, but I still don't get it. Do people buy it just for the colors? How fucking pathetic.

Anyway, I figured I would probably go with a flash drive player as the hard drive players are usually over $200. Unfortunately, most of the flash players come in rediculous packages and are overpriced. Then Apple announced the iPod Shuffle. This might be the perfect player for me. The 1G model is priced at $149, which is right at my price point. It doesn't have any kind of user interface at all, which doesn't really bother me. It has play/pause, forward/backward, and volume control, which is all I really need (the same as a standard CD player). They call it the Shuffle because it has a shuffle mode where it plays songs at random. You can also use it in normal mode where it plays songs in the order you set in iTunes. It's the size of a small USB flash drive, so it's highly portable. I can't find any retail stores that are carrying the 1G version (the 512M version goes for $99), so I would probably have to order directly from Apple. That sucks because Apple says it will ship in 3 to 4 weeks.

My second choice would probably be this (or something like it). It's a little bigger than the iPod Shuffle, same capacity, and it has a display on it. I think you can also create and edit playlists on it. But I'm a bit concerned about the controls because it uses a joystick, and those tend to break quite easily. If anyone is reading this (LOL, get a life), do you have any other suggestions that are in the $150 range?