The iPod Shuffle and Consumer Actions
March 20th, 2007
So, I bought an iPod shuffle the other day. The dawning realization that I did not need to carry 80 gigs of music with me (I had told myself that I was holding out for an 80 gig hd on one of them) was the motivating factor. The shuffle is tiny, holds a gig, which for me is roughly 14-15 hours, and runs for 12 hours or so before needing a charge.
Recently I’ve been feeling that a lot of the choice that modern society offers actually complicates things. If I have all of my music available to me at one time, I’m not going to be able to decide. I know myself. I am also likely to spend a lot of time listening to the same small sample of music that I fall back on from time to time. The shuffle actually makes me choose to walk out on to the street with music that I might not feel like listening to when it comes up, and it doesn’t have a screen, which makes changing tracks cumbersome.
I decided that I like that.
I’ve spent a while with it now, and I’m liking my music collection more. After I ditched the random loading, I put fifteen albums I wanted to get to know better on it. Then I listened to them. I didn’t skip. I actually paid attention to the music again. It was not the way I’ve been listening to music for a few years now, and it was good.
Which is all beside the point. Here’s what it comes down to when I think about it now. The Shuffle, with 1 gig, costs $80. The iPod Video, with 80 gigs, costs $350. Unless your musical listening experience is almost solely defined by a need for instant gratification, it’s $270 more, for utility that you probably won’t use.
It was one of those moments where I got a little angry with myself for not feeling that way from the start.
March 20th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
I definitely hear where you’re coming from – I have been frantically trying to fill my 80 gig pod ever since I started realizing exactly how absurd that purchase was in the first place (apparently I would have been fine with, you know, 30…). And now I’m drooling over shuffles, for the exact reasons you described. I do miss the old fashioned CD-in-stereo days sometimes.
March 21st, 2007 at 11:34 am
Yeah, that said, I saw a girl on the bus the other day who was carrying her cds with her. She must have had a 50 cd case in one hand. This has two downsides. The first is that with a CD player the cost of diversity in weight carried is very high. The iPods are great for that. The second is that despite the “mug me white” earbuds, they are still less noticeable than a cd case, as you don’t have to take them out of your coat to change albums.
My advice on the iPod would be to rip (and there is mac and pc software out there for this) a couple of your favorite “rainy day watch for the 400th time” films on it. It’ll be like having a can of chicken soup with you at all times, which come to think of it, is not a bad idea.