Anyways, where was I? I can't believe I bought into the hype of the iPod Touch and, almost (no thanks to Fido's stellar customer service - but more on that later) the iPhone. Well, what's done is done. I got the iTouch, played around with it for about three months - and then felt the pain of poor usability design, lack of phone features and, last but not least, planned obsolescence. I had withdrawal symptoms for the past couple of days, but now I'm back with a clear head.
Exhibit A: The OS on the iTouch is actually a piece of shit. It glitches when you scroll, touch or rotated items and it had a fucked-up file sorting order; it needs a lot of hacks to work right. To boot, iTunes won't let me load 35% of my songs, because they have to be converted or because it just can't read them. Don't even get me started on the non-free updates, the App Store, jailbreaking the iTouch or iPhone every three seconds, or Zibri's bitching. No cute game is worth this.
Exhibit B: What kind of portable media player does not work as an external hard drive?! Fucking hell...
Exhibit C: File conversion: Why do I have to do brain surgery to get songs or TV shows onto the iPod?! iTunes is nothing without at least two or three third-party programs.
Exhibit D: The iPhone-iTouch continuum. Let me paint you a picture: The good folks over at Apple shout their lungs off about the new iPhone. People listen up; they get really hyped up on the button-less design, the WiFi and multitouch. The iPhone gets released. It's pretty, buggy and expensive. Then, a refied version of the iPhone gets released - the iPod Touch. It's prettier, but still buggy and expensive (but it has no phone). People get turned onto the iTouch - bam - the iPhone 3G gets released, making a mint-condition iTouch immediately obsolete. Oh, and a second-generation iTouch is released shortly afterwards, you know, just to patch up those rough edges. If you are not thinking "What the fuck?!" yet, you should be.
Exhibit E: The pricing: The first-generation, 32GB iTouch cost me about $500. The 16GB iPhone costs $350 from either Rogers or Fido (which are, actually, the same company), provided you get their three-year, $90+/month contract...provided you can get it (Fido essentially told me to fuck off because I was less than ninety days on my current monthly plan). So, should I get a second-generation iTouch only to see it become obsolete in another three months because the designers forgot ton add some more buttons? No, sir, thank you kindly.
So what's the verdict, you ask? Well, I, ladies and gentlemen, am just about ready to revise the good, 'ol Weltanschauung. Remember my extensive rants about ubiquity, Microsoft, Apple and everything? At this very moment, I am ready to present a corollary of my earlier theory: if ubiquity is a positive-feedback loop driven by popularity, it must have constraints - either a lack of choice, or a lack of quality.
As I have had to admit (with more and more pain every day), dear, old Vista proves this point perfectly: the dummies love it, the normal people hate it, but it's still preloaded on a shitload of machines and getting it out and replacing it with a proper WinXP SP3 (heh) install is akin to skinning Michael Scofield alive to get those nifty tattoos off him. As the song goes, "you can check out anytime, but you can never leave" - (well, unless you go to *nix, eh, Mite? ;)
Anyways, the iPhnod [sic] seemingly went the other way, offering great quality and style for high value, at the same time offering ubiquity at no cost (after all, who doesn't want to be seen with those nifty, white earbuds). The problem, in this case (and, actually in any case concerning Apple hardware) is an exorbitant price for a pretty face and a below-par value. Microsoft Zune 120GB at 128 grams for $249.99 vs. the iPod Touch 32GB at 115 grams for $399.99 - that's an $11.77/GB difference, and, yes, all I need player is - that's right - movies and music. Fuck the maps, fuck the games, fuck the design, fuck the ubiquity. I am, once again, free.
By the way, I am still alive (overweight) and well. I read a lot of Ayn Rand (for the narrative, not the Objectivist insanity, mind you; Anthem was truly a literary masterpiece, I must add - and The Fountainhead, Rand's prototype for Atlas Shrugged holds me in thrall quite tightly at the moment). I am now a big fish in a *cough* big pond at VTC. I have a girlfriend, a backlog of poetry and occasional rectal bleeding (all unrelated, heh). Oh, I didn't vote in the elections because I am too old to play with toys. Dixi.