Life before iPod must be pretty boring. Previously you had to take your CD’s with you in a walkman and listen to 14 songs at a time. You need to worry about the batteries running out and the CD walkman can hardly fit in a pocket.
Along came iPod. Pretty cool. You can take all your music with you. Its pocketable. Slides inside your pocket, and only two white headsets stuck in your ear will show that you are enjoying your music. You can be doing other stuff, like reading a book, dozing through your commute or jogging. With the headsets stuck in your ear, you can be in your own world. Not only did it change the way people thought about music, it came in a pretty slick package. Best of all, it is “cool”.
And then the next evolutionary step is supposedly Video iPod. Help me understand why anyone will need a Video iPod? All the advantages of iPod are there, but instead of sticking the iPod in your pocket, you are supposed to look at a tiny 2.5" screen and figure out which housewife is more desperate. What an incredibly stupid idea! It is for this reason, I don’t want my kids to preen at the 2" LCD at the back of my digital camera to view the snapshot, but rather they wait to watch it on a larger screen. The reason iPod became so popular was because it allowed people to multi-task. Not so with video iPod. You can either watch it or you can not. Its just a “oh its so cool” factor, but practically a meaningless gadget. Just like Nokia’s 7280. Slick but utterly impractical.
For the same reason I despise watching any movie on a computer screen. No matter how many people boast about downloading stuff from Torrents or Kazaa or whatever next wave of bootleg movie source is, I just can’t fathom why people will want to “waste” a nice movie by watching it on their 15" or 17" or 19" monitor screen. Yeah, so its cool to watch movies for free, but frankly I’d rather watch a movie on my 27" or 32" or 42" big screen tv screen. Why the heck do people go to movie theaters to watch movies? Because its a large screen and movies look better when you watch them on a large screen. Trust me, you don’t want to “waste” a good movie by trying to squint through a 17" computer monitor, with grainy print and sucky sound.
And to be honest, if you feel good to break the law, and save 9 bucks by spending the entire night to download “King Kong” and watched it on your geeky 17" CRT, then, by jolly, you don’t deserve to be called “cool”, anyway.
:k: