he said it himself: it was expensive, and didn't have as much storage as other players.

i'll go one further: it supports and extends itunes terrible DRM.

every iPod purchased is another (often involuntary) soldier in the war against free art. I have friends asking me how they can transfer their MP4's from their ipods to their home stereo. when i explain how complicated it is, they are shocked. when i tell them how they don't own the music they bought - that apple can at any time rescind their listening privileges, they usually wonder how apple is getting away with this.

and the answer is, because of mindless articles like this. he spends pages talking about the power of MUSIC. Mr. Manjoo, the form factor of your mp3 player is irrelevant. i was listening to a 20GB player with 10 hours' battery life before steve jobs even thought of the ipod (the PJB, which i still use every day, which is STILL better than an ipod almost 10 years later).

I liked the article and completely related to the author's point of view. I don't own an iPod, but I started downloading MP3s obsessively in 96. Sometimes I get a hankering for a song, only to listen to about 45 seconds of it before moving on to the next song.

After reading some of the responses to this article, I now realize that I am a bad person. A mindless idiotic consumerist who doesn't devote every second of his life to Important Topics.

You know, it never fails to amaze me how many jerks read this site.

Levy: The iPod is "the center of just about every controversy in the digital age."

Levy, after 9/11: "How could you devote your energies to documenting the Internet, cool gadgets, and the future of music when all this darkness was afoot?" Then, listening to his iPod, "The faces around me suddenly became characters in a movie centered around my own memories and emotions. A black-and-white moment of existence had sprung into Technicolor. I held my iPod a bit tighter. I wasn't exactly forgetting about 9/11, but ..."

Manjoo: "The iPod is just about alone in our world of things in at least striving for perfection."

Jesus, what a couple of rubes these two are. This article and this book are good evidence that American culture is geared for children. Manjoo in particular has a bad tendency to generalize his own experiences, apparently unaware that there are now millions of iPods out there in the hands of people other than Gen-Y hipsters, and they're using them in many different ways. The iPod is a terrific product, but if it has changed your life, then you haven't lived much, regardless of your age.

The one thing Manjoo says that shows wisdom is this: "Some lonely nights, I wonder if the most interesting thing I'll ever be able to say about my life is that I was there when Steve Jobs introduced the iPod to the world." Follow that thought, Farhad. You're finally onto something.

Four things about the I-Pod, who I identify as mostly people with white cords going up into their ears.

1. I-Pod users never talk to anyone on the bus or train.

2. No one talks to them unles they are trying to get them to move.

3. I-Pod users don't read on the train or bus. They are part of the a-literate generation.

4. Listening to music while doing other things favors easily digestible music.

Etc. Nuff said.

I love music. I listen at homes or in clubs.

Listening all the time to music while walking around in the world seems very sad. It has been remarked upon by foreigners as one of the signs of American isolation. I don't think this is Luddite or "oldster" - descriptions themselves which are pejorative, of course. It is actually a broader sociological criticism that, and I am going to dish out my own pejorative as retribution, perhaps somewhat more shallow people are probably too busy listening to some single to even think about. Contemplation is made more difficult when you are always listening to a pre-programmed "sound track of your dull life."

The I-Pod is a symbol of American escapism and inwardness, or at least that is the way it looks to us folks on the outside, who haven't drunk the kool aid.

All those youngsters on the subway who are playing their iPods so loudly that I can recognize the song from across the car will be deaf by the time they are 40.

Why does Mac remain on the planet? Not because they're cooler or make a product really worth the always much higher price, they're around because there are people that hate PC/Windows and because there are artists that get them because they used to be better at art than a PC. The iPod? It became trendy, but I don't know anyone now that is opting for an iPod over the less expensive competition, Creative Labs and the like.

My roommate had gotten an iPod a few years ago. We tried uploading music through the PC. Of course, since it didn't have a seperate power cable and didn't seem to get power properly from the USB, the machine kept dying in the middle of trying to fill the hd. After a month or two, there was an OS error on the iPod and it became completely unrecovereable. I couldn't reformat the HD, I couldn't delete the songs already on there. What did happen was the index of the songs was erased so all the songs were unreachable. We ended up practically giving it away at a garage sale. She now has a Creative Labs MP3 player and thinks it is better than iPod ever was. And it was less expensive than a new iPod.

As far as "the greatest music innovation since recording", I have to disagree. Radio madee music far more accessable to the masses, a transistor radio let people bring it anywhere, the LP changed how musicians viewed music and how fans listened, headphones let people listen differently as well. Cassette tapes and CDs have let fans put music together in whatever order they wanted for decades. The walkman and car tape/cd players let people choose what they listened to "on the go" long before iPod. Music Videos changed people's perception of music, adding a visual dimension. Napster and other, cheaper, less proprietary music services let people try new bands cheaper. All iPod did was take an existing technology and make it "cool". While the MP3 player, of which iPod is one, may rank with radio, LPs, transistor radios, etc... iPod itself is ultimately no more important than any other brand.

And it popularized the annoying habit of putting "i" in front of things.