Let’s talk about my iPod. I love my iPod. But I also hate my iPod.
My iPod is a 1 Gig shuffle. And it hasn’t worked right since day one. Oh, it plays music, it acts as a flash drive, it does what you expect it to to on the surface!
But it’s the little things… things that if they happened once or twice every week or so, wouldn’t be that bad. But otherwise could bring a man to tears.
Start with the name iPod Shuffle. Mine doesn’t shuffle. Turn it off and on till the cows come home to their iBarn and it’ll just keep playing in the order that it was loaded on via iTunes. That’s not such a big deal, but it’s Morissette levels of irony.
Speaking of iTunes. Loading the damn thing takes the steely nerves of a brain surgeon. If I plug it into my USB2.0 hub (or, before I had that, into the USB1.1 port on the front of my PC) I watch as the little arrows spin as the songs are copied over. Now, with 1 Gig of space you can get on a fair number of songs, as I’m watching the little arrows spin away, suddenly!, iTunes can no longer see the iPod. Windows makes the “USB disconnected” sound, lights flash on the iPod and then the “USB connected” sound. iTunes sees the shuffle but for no apparent reason everything that was just copied over is missing! iTunes starts from scratch again at song one.
That’s a lot of fun.
What I end up doing is stopping the sync every 10-20 songs and then starting it up again. Problem solved. But it’s a HUGE pain in the ass when you just want to update the songs on your iPod before going to bed. And it’s not just my PC, I use it at work to transfer files and I have about 2-3 min’s of it dropping out and picking up again before it’s safe to try and copy stuff. Neat!
Humm… now, what’s third?? Oh yes! Sporadically when I pause a song I’m unable to unpause it. Nothing works. It’s not a case of I have the buttons locked, I get the green light, not the amber when I push the button, but I still have to reset the damn thing. And I don’t like that. Apple and it’s zelots treat the hardware and the company as if it was blessed by God. And if they want to make such claims, I want the results to back it up.
And what the hell is up with the headphones? Either they’re too loose and fall out of my ears or if I wedge them in place they hurt. Can my ears be both too large and too small at the same time? I’m perfectly
willing to accept that it’s some odd biological quirk on my genome which keeps them from fitting right, but once again, if it’s a ‘blessed’ product then I expect perfection.
My last gripe, isn’t a particular flaw in my model, it’s a design “omission” that they need to fix. The Shuffle can perform every major basic function of a full fledge iPod except for two differences. One, it doesn’t display trackname or other data, and two, it doesn’t allow you to set or change a song rating. I think this is crucial to the whole idea of iTunes and it’s marriage to the iPod. The Shuffle is just another generic MP3 player (that can connect to iTunes without having to piss around) without it. And it (seems like it) would be so easy to fix. They already have the “embedded” green and amber light for the controls, why not put another 5 just like it going down the front of the body? Each light represents a star in iTunes (I think that is obvious). Then at the bottom light have a outline of a start pressed/engraved into the plastic and have “filled” star at the 5th light at the top. Squeezing the body at either of these two points will trigger the lights coming on to indicate the rating. While these are on, pressing again with lower or raise the rating.
I wonder if I could photoshop an example… here goes nothing. It’s been grabbed from whatever Google Images could come up with.
This is an example of a 4 star rating.
