I like my iPod. I like all my Apple products. Good industrial design is a true joy to live with.

I'd like to see Farhad Manjoo sent to Iraq to do some reporting, talk to the folks on the street, find out what's really happening over there. You understand what I'm saying.

I love my iPod. It sure beats the heck out of carrying 25 CDs to work with me every day which is what I used to do. I used to be a radio junkie and with radio getting corporate and force feeding you the same songs every day (sometimes every few hours), iPod is a panacea. Just put it on shuffle and voila, your own radio station.

I take exception with ELYDOG's letter that people with iPods on the bus and train don't read. I read all the time, I just happen to suffer from motion sickness so rather than puke all over my fellow commuters, I listen to my iPod. I don't turn the volume up very loudly so that if someone says something to me, I can hear them. iPod just adds a little extra something nice to my commute. Yes, it is not perfect and I wish my battery would last longer but it is something that has brought a lot of joy to my life.

Once I'd filled my new iPod with songs I already knew it created a hunger in me to hear new music, which I found starting with Salon's Daily Download and spreading outwards from there to sites like The Hype Machine that aggregates new music from dozens of bloggers.

I hadn't listened to new music in YEARS, but with the portable nano accompanying me on my commute, my gym workouts, and my many hours of outdoor gardening work it just begged for new tunes.

I load all new songs into a New Downloads playlist, weed out the less than stellar songs, and about once a month burn it to CD with my own artwork or imagery from the internet for stereo play. I generally burn a copy for younger friends who also enjoy the new music. The iPod becomes my pre-screening device for what will make it to CD.

The other main use for the Nano that no one has mentioned is that it's great for listening to Audible books. Sign up for a package rate and you can listen to new books as they come out for as little as $10-- while those books are still in hardback. If I really love an audiobook I then go buy it in hardback (used) at Amazon.

The end result-- a constant flow of new books, ideas, and songs into my life. This can only be good for the brain!

About the time my husband bought an iPod, I bought a recorder. The wooden kind that you blow through, with the little holes in the side for your fingers. A really nice alto recorder, made of a lovely African hardwood. It cost about the same as his iPod.

Having a limited budget for toys, a large CD collection already, and a recorder quartet to play with, I made a conscious decision to opt for the toy that will still work in 20 years. And as time has gone on, and the shelf life for electronic gadgetry gets ever shorter, I'm saving my money this time for a really nice tenor recorder.

I'm not a luddite. I have a houseful of electronic doodads to rival the neighborhood. But I get tired of their short lifespan, the feeling that every single electronic thing I buy is outdated by the time I break the shrinkwrap. It makes me all the more aware that if I'm trying to spend money wisely, I need to think clearly about how long what I'm buying will last. I can live without an iPod. I like knowing that at least in one small way I'm not contributing to tomorrow's landfill when the next thing comes along.

As someone who loves the technology (if not technology in general), I would be interested to know how closely the book looks at the effect the white earbuds are having on our hearing and why the article doesn't make more of it. As evidenced by early studies, it doesn't take a visionary on the order of a Steve Jobs to see that this could become a critical issue in years to come.

I would also be interested to know how deeply the book examines what we're *not* listening to when we're listening to our iPods--traffic, ambient noise, people's conversations. These sounds may be mundane, but sometimes I worry about how we (I include myself here) are turning our attention away from so much of the world in favor of passing through it with minimal disruption to our own thoughts. Or our entertainment.

The temptation is to reply to all these anti-iPod letters. (Hey, it's a great product. If you don't like it or want one, fine. I don't like mushrooms, so I don't order them.) But we'll leave that alone.

The real problem with the article is the overuse of "you." "You do this, you feel like this, you hate this about your iPod, you love this about it." Well no, not necessarily. It's lazy thinking and lazy writing to assume that everyone has the same experience. In fact, one of the great things about the iPod is that everyone can have their own experience of it.

All your initial complaints are fluff. It's easy to move and copy playlists among numerous computers and ipods; Mac only? since when? And you're actually buying a SHUFFLE?

The rest of your article is palpable neurotic twaddle. You are bewildered by the vast new choices available to you, craving the days of crampy limitation.

My ipod is indispensable. My life of media access (you seem only to listen to commercial recording company product) has never been so good.

I've owned every iPod they've issued (not always planned, by that's the way these things happen). It took me forever to figure out what the attraction was. Sure, I'm music-obsessed. I like to think that my fondness for opera as well as the Rolling Stones makes me an audiophile, but it turns out I'm an amateur compared to some of my more demanding associates. And realistically, I listen to a lot of my music in the car during my commute. The radio was doing me fine. And then the iPod came along.

I knew about other digital music players. They weren't that expensive, and they weren't that interesting. But the iPod did something that the others didn't: it was a very small, very portable, reasonably large hard-drive. I could store files as well as music on a UDF HD that I could use to transfer data from PC's and Mac's, and in my lab-soaked world of higher education, that was as useful a reason to pick up a music player as any other. So, I bought my first. It was great—for about six months. Then, the battery died, and I exchanged it for the next generation (late adopter, good warrantee). Smaller, faster, and smoother: I loved it from the first time it came out of the box.

But it took me until I needed an iPod nano to figure out why. I needed an ultra-portable flash drive, and the nano was only marginally more expensive than the 2GB USB flash drive I was considering, so I figured "why not"? Then, I opened it, and the attraction became obvious.

I grew up watching a promise of the future. We landed on the moon, had satellites, space ships, and our world was on the brink of a powerful technological future. Then, in about 1985, it basically stopped. Sure, there have been plenty of under-the-hood renovations (computers have obviously gotten faster and smaller), but the majority of technologies that were around in 1985 are still around, just more refined. There hasn't been a great feeling of "invention." And then the nano comes along. Sure, it's just a packaged chip with some interface adjustments, but it looks like something out of the 21st Century as it was imagineered for my parents. It's a bit of the "home of tomorrow" in my hands, for a mere $200. It feels like the future.

This is what Apple has captured in a 6oz. bit of plastic and silicon. If you’re wondering why it’s the iPod and not another MP3 player, I think it’s because somehow Steve Jobs and company has realized that the future never came. Our cars still hug the road, combustion engines are still the norm, and so much of what the future holds still remains in sketches and not-for-production concept models. The nano, and its big brother the iPod, brings a bit of the future in our hands. When I look at the iPod, it reminds me that the future isn’t a possibility; it’s a promise. It takes some time, some effort, and some imagination, but as I look at my nano, I see a sliver of the 21st Century I imagined 20 years ago—in my hands.