Rationalizing a New iPod

Oct 31, 2006

For her 15th birthday, Ross requested an iPod. She was at theater camp in the US and lots of kids there had one – she was suffering from gadget lust. I got her a 2nd –generation model with 15 GB of disk space. To my great irritation, Apple announced the new models the day after I ordered it, but Amazon was kind enough (after some prompting) to give me a retroactive discount on this now-outdated model.

Our initial experience with the iPod wasn’t happy - we had problems communicating with it from the computer to add and remove music. But Ross loved having her music in her pocket so she could listen to it while riding the bus to school etc.

About nine months later, she decided she had to have a new iPod, with 30 GB of disk space and the ability to display photos. She had some money from her grandmother, but not quite enough, so we made a deal: I made up the difference, and inherited her “old” iPod when she got the new one.

This is the iPod I’ve been using ever since, whose battery I replaced last January. One happy side effect of having two is that we discovered that the connection problems we had been having with the old one were solved using the USB cable that came with the new one, rather than the FireWire cable it originally came with. Apple’s subsequent updates to the iPod and iTunes software probably also helped. I grew addicted to my iPod, dependending on it to cheer me up during the bus, metro, and sidewalk portions of my long daily commutes, and for long plane rides.

We bought Enrico an iPod of his own for his 49th birthday. He doesn’t use his nearly as much, but likes it for learning new songs on the piano (he plays by ear).

Well, my old iPod gave out a month ago, probably from having been bumped around once too often. I can still communicate with it from the computer (so could use it as removable storage, I guess), but it doesn’t respond to its buttons. I lived without for a few weeks, but that was as long as I could stand: I missed my music, and had also just gotten into listening to podcasts. Not the amateur radio-hour stuff (I can’t stand talk radio even when done by professionals), but I’ve discovered that you can download great talks by people who lecture for a living, on all kinds of topics.

One of Enrico’s pet rants is about how consumers today are so stupid that we’ll buy anything if it’s sufficiently marketed to us, even when it’s clearly designed to break down fast so we’ll have to buy a new one soon. My counter-argument was that, if the iPod were engineered to last five years, it might have to be priced so high that no one would buy it. I don’t have hard evidence for this (yet), but I have read that Microsoft’s forthcoming Zune music player will be a “loss leader” – in other words, they will sell it for less than it cost to make it, because they expect to gain some other business benefit from it. This could well be the case with the iPod, or might have been early in its career. People with iPods buy music from the iTunes store, and Apple has even seen an increase in its share of the personal computer market, likely as a result of people’s affection for their iPods.

Whoever’s right or wrong about this, I had to have a new iPod. As I was going to the store to buy one, it occurred to me that there is in any case another way to look at this. Sure, we pay a lot of money for a small object that seems to break down pretty quickly. But I paid $250 for the old iPod, plus $40 to replace its battery, and it lasted about 25 months. $12 per month for listening pleasure and a more cheerful commute seems pretty reasonable to me. I apply the same logic when I buy expensive spectacles every three years or so: they’re on my face all day every day for years, so I feel justified in spending more to get nice ones.

My research on the reliability of the iPod seemed to show that the models with solid-state memory are less likely to break down than the hard disk models, so my new iPod is a Nano, the cheapest model that still has a screen (necessary to be able to choose my podcasts out of the mix). It cost 149 euros and, if it lasts a couple of years, I’ll be happy.

Apr 2007 update: As it turned out, I could have (and, later, did) fixed the old iPod myself...