iCrap

It has been a loooooong time since I've posted on this blog. this one was just too juicy to let slip by and, since it's got nothing to do with my cancer, I've chosen to dust this blog off and air some righteous indignation.

Future topics may include career politics (in honor of Ted Kennedy who finally got his due), welfare/universal healthcare, the extremes of left/right politics (closely tied to career politics), big box chain restaurants, the proliferation of dairy products, anything Apple that sucks (sorry for the double negative), the crap cars known as hybrids and the social elite who drive them, and my continuing series on poor drivers and the nonsense they post on the Internet.

Meanwhile, enjoy the new post.



The Apple otaku have been spun back into a frenzy again today. Their own, personal, Jesus, Steve Jobs announced the latest (yawn) iTunes, iPod, and iCrap to a waiting mass of social elites, starving for another Apple-branded Thing and they got it.

The discerning public (known as Those People by the iLeet) yawned in response to another Walkman and a software update that should have just popped up on screen when the old version detected a new one. The truly desirable Apple device is still chained to a single service provider. Apple's opinion of market choice seems to extend no further than the color of your little Walkman...

No, the only really noteworthy portion of yesterdays iLove-in is the groundbreaking new features of the nano. Bear with me here. The nano now features a video camera! Ooh, and a pedometer! And an FM tuner! And, what's this? Genius Mixing! Fabulous!

In my own particular order, here's the rub. Genius Mixing is nothing more than shuffling or random track selection that even the earliest CD players have been doing for decades. Remember the CD? It came out the year after the Macintosh. Yeah, Genius Mixing is that old.

The pedometer is nice because, let's face it, the Walkman was great for taking tunes along on a walk or a run. But let's also face this; you don't really need a gadget to tell you how far you walked. If you're training for a marathon, great, but unless you're being graded on how much you exercise, you don't need it. (I heard a radio news story about a college that is actually doing this now, but I say let the college figure out how to record the workouts. Or, gasp, use the existing Nike+ widget for iPods!)

With amazing lack of vision, iPods, from the very start have only provided their users with patently stupid earbuds. Sitting still with a pair of those things almost perched in your ears is an exercise in Zen patience. Few of us have it so we suffer with imbalanced sound and, ultimately, pain in our ears from having had to jam the damned 'buds into some acceptable position that keeps them from falling out and maybe sounds okay. Try jogging and keeping those stupid things in place. Don't break a sweat though or abandon all hope.

The nano should be heavier to at least provide some beneficial resistance training for having to exercise with a Walkman that can't be listened to. Five points from Applepuff House; the earbuds for the Walkman sucked too so they could have tried to invent -something- new instead of copying Sony thirty years on.

At least while you're out exercising you too might be in the right place at the right time with the right equipment to capture the latest Youtube video or breaking CNN/Fox news clip.

I hear JJ Abrams has first rights of refusal to all first person iPod nano video journalism for his next flop, er, film. The next Blair Witch and Cloverfield are in your hands, iLeet!

Which brings me to the FM tuner; a feature first found on, you guessed it, the Walkman... thirty years ago.

Walkmans could record too! And now so can the nano. Almost. The video camera records (presumably) and will let you violate your agreement not to videotape that rock concert or feature film your ticket got you in to see. The nano can now pause and rewind fifteen minutes back into broadcast radio... but not record it indefinitely. Oh no, that would circumvent your having to visit the iTunes Store and purchase that song.

Sorry, budding journalists, you're stuck with your old fashioned recorders for those interviews but definitely pick up a nano so you can video record your subject. Poorly. Ah, now I'm being unfair.

Fortunately the new nano also plays video, even that which you haven't recorded yourself, so now you too can socially isolate yourself like the iPod video player owners of yesterday. Forgive me, but who the hell watches videos on such tiny screens? Are you that starved for entertainment? Stupid question... you've got those stupid earbuds crammed in your ears... that should have been my first clue.

Carry on. Apple will soon have a whole line of outdoor gear for camping outside their stores for their next line of Walkman players. Be sure to get the autographed U2 sleeping bag and post on facebook from your iPhone as soon as you've got your fix. While you're busy feeling superior, the rest of us will be sleeping comfortably with money in our accounts for the really useful Next Best Thing.