Apple’s iPod is the reasonable standard by which all other media players are judged. Its design and style, as well as engineering, are topnotch.

iPods come in many sizes and a few colors. The regular iPods use tiny hard-drives, while the Shuffle and the Nano use solid-state flash for storage. Flash players hold less music, but they are also more durable and you can wear them while jogging, since they have no moving parts.

The 1GB Shuffle, which holds about 15 hours of music and has no display, is the cheapest and most reasonable player for the casual music listener. Larger capacities (up to 80GB on regular iPod) are useful for videos and an unreasonable amount of music (80GB = 15 DVDs or 1000 albums). I never used more than 5 of my iPod’s 20GB and most of that was the entire catalogs of Frederic Chopin, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and They Might Be Giants. Thank god for the skip button.

The only unreasonable thing about Apple’s iDevices has been the battery, which can’t be replaced, and eventually will have difficulty holding a charge (like all batteries). You have to send the device back to Apple and they will send you another one, for a fee of course. Their customer service is very reasonable, though, and the worst part is having to reload all of your music every two years.

The iPod does not receive ultrareasonable status because of the battery, and also because you pretty much have to use iTunes. Which is still very reasonable, just not ultrareasonable.

Saul :: Jun.29.2007 :: Music Player :: No Comments »

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