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Articles and Reviews
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The Apple
iPod – An observational treatise into the musicality of compressional musical file formats and their intrinsic properties on the spatial
aspects of an invididual’s cognitive abilities
(or, a madman’s journey into compression hell)
In some articles and reviews I’ve posted in the past, I have made some disdainful comments against the Apple iPod. While I could grouse about the fashionable aspects of the iPod and its progeny of iPod Mini’s and iPod Shuffle’s, that had nothing to do with my attitude towards it. Instead, it was the paltry battery life that many iPod users have experienced. The iPod is a very compact device for a hard drive based music player that offers 20, 40 and 60 GB capacities. It uses a 1.8-inch hard drive and the battery is a flat lithium polymer sourced from Sony. It’s this battery that gave me the biggest issue against the iPod and what kept me from buying one for many moons…until now that is. The battery life had become such an issue that someone went to the trouble of producing a little video spoof to post on the Internet, in which a young man creates a stencil and proceeds to spray paint the stencil all over town, decrying the pitiful life duration of the iPod battery and Apple’s refusal to acknowledge the problem. Class action lawsuits have resulted because of this battery life issue. Apple finally acknowledged the problem and offers battery replacement during the warranty period and after the warranty has expired, will charge US $100 for the service. But, has anything really changed about the iPod’s battery life other than an acknowledgement that it can be bad for some users? No. So why would I want to buy one? Well, every other hard drive based player could suffer the same problem because they also use similar types of batteries as the iPod. Since every other player could be similarly affected, my main knock against the iPod became rather moot. And just as some users of the iPod have experienced hard drive failures, so too have users of other hard drive based players. Another reason in favor of the iPod is that if the battery does go caput, a Belkin battery pack can be bought, which while bulky, should allow an iPod with an otherwise dead battery to continue providing music on the go. It also came to my attention that third-party suppliers sell replacement iPod batteries and includes instructions on how to do so on one’s own. I’m no handyman, but I figure I could handle a bit of battery replacement surgery. It was time to move on and just get on with life with a large capacity MP3 player. Part 2 Choice of Players |
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Correspondence & About this website Copyright © 1998-2008 Edwin Leong |
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Excuse
me while I hunt me down some crow, as I have to prepare a plate of
it for a little dinner.