I have now been fundamentally engaged with an iPod for over a year. I bought a 40gb last winter, and then I slammed a car door on it in October, smashing it so fundamentally that Apple refused to work on it at all. I sat on my fingers for the rest of the autumn, but in January I caved and bought a Mini. After a fiasco with FedEx regarding the delivery (tip for tots: if you are asked to sign for a package that is not for you, but you know the person it is for, sign for it and keep your mouth shut), it got delivered on Valentine’s Day, making it, I think, the best Valentine’s Day of my life. I will now go cry.
So I think I’m finally ready for a review of the little device, in part prompted by a recent bit of super frustration.
If you know me, you probably know that I’m a nut about different languages and different writing systems. If I can, I will always try to avoid a transliteration, for example. Hell, I will spend more time learning how Tamil is written and figuring out how to render it on my computer than in viewing the movie whose title I want to be able to write out in Tamil. Unicode is one of the greatest things to happen in my life, and the fact that OS X is natively Unicode has made me even happier. I use the Unicode functionality a lot more often than one would think—making posters, etc., in Lithuanian is much easier now, for example. But I also use it a lot in iTunes. If I get something with a name in a non-latin-1 writing system, I will reproduce it, from “Нас не догонят” by t.A.T.u to “妖怪人間ベム” by 東京スカパラダイスオーケストラ. Even my Masada albums, which all have song titles that are transliterated, have album titles which are not, so out comes the Hebrew.
So the Mac can do this. iTunes can do this. Why the hell can’t the iPod? “Kai nematau tavęs” by Tigra becomes “Kai nematau tavs.” Not actually a big deal, sure, but what about when “कुछ ना कहो” becomes “ ”? (To be fair, even Firefox on the Mac can’t handle Devanagari, even though it’s natively available in OS X.) The iPod suddenly becomes rather useless, it seems. Or useless as a point of market share, at least.
Via Manan, I hear of a petition for Hebrew support for the iPod. Already a hack exists that allows Hebrew to be rendered, but apparently Apple refuses to support it. But what’s confusing here is that the iPod is still a little picky about what it supports and doesn’t. That is, the iPod can handle all the Chinese / kana I throw at it. It can also handle the t.A.T.u. title above. It just can’t handle Lithuanian (or probably most beyond-latin-1 charsets), Hindi, or Hebrew. Obviously, I imagine, the iPod sells like hotcakes in Japan, so Japanese support makes sense. But why be all piecemeal? Why not just have the entire Unicode table in there? Even when I try to save files as utf-8 and upload them to the iPod Notes folder, I get nothing but gibberish in return. That’s not fair, is it?
This may all seem rather pedantic and silly, and, I agree, to a degree, it is. But it’s still sort of bewildering why Apple would have chosen to do things the way they have. The iPod can handle over a dozen languages in its interface, but it can’t even print the text of a language spoken by almost 200 million people? That doesn’t seem quite right.
My only other complaint with the iPod is that when you plug it into the computer, it forgets what song it was playing. Oh, and turning shuffle on and off is way too much work.
April 29th, 2005 at 18:01
Do you miss not having the 40 gigs? I personally think 40 gigs is ridiculous. Even if you have 40 gigs of songs, most of them are like “yo yo ma” tracks you downloaded while procrastinating on a paper b.c you were searching for the best paper-writing music ever, and you thought cello has a good writing vibe about it. Then there was the experimentation with country songs involving jesus. Or greek opera (never again).
April 30th, 2005 at 10:52
I am anticipating owning a laptop soon. In that case, 40gb is def beyond my level of interest.
The 40gb is useful if you have no computer at home, and you want your collection available. This is, for example, Steve’s excuse. If you have a laptop, an iPod that big is never necessary.
And I generally found that the interface of the iPod is too clumsy to handle all that information. 40gb is like a month’s worth of music. That’s a lot of flipping you have to do to get to stuff.
Finally, I agree. There’s no way one needs access to 40gb of songs at the drop of a hat. There is no party in the world where a music library that big makes it that much better. I’m positive I could fill my iPod mini and drop a place dead. I would wager that even djs don’t travel with a month’s worth of records when they do shows.
A more thoughtful discussion of the problem of giant music libraries and random access to them is offered here.