A Weak Apology For Giving Apple All My Money

My iPod is ancient. It’s almost two years old. It still works perfectly fine, but I can’t help feeling that soon I’m going to buy a new one.

It has a 20 Gigabyte capacity, and a black and white display. They stopped selling them soon after I bought it, and then you could only buy a 30GB device with a color screen. Clearly my model was considered way too limited – you can’t see the album artwork, and you can’t watch videos. All you can do is listen to music, which is all I wanted it for. But still, color’s better than black and white.

My ancient iPod has 4,579 songs on it at the moment, almost full to capacity. That’s more songs than I have time to listen to, but maybe only about one third of my CD collection. I get 30 new downloads a month off eMusic too, and a lot of the time I delete old songs to make way for the new ones. Which I don’t have time to listen to. But still, if I could get 20,000 songs on there instead of nearly 5,000, I would.

It’s a little grubby, and a little scratched, but I’m still in awe of all that it holds. I still love to cradle it in my right hand and marvel at the fact that there are almost 5,000 songs in this tiny little device. Though it’s not as tiny as the ones other people wear down the gym. Those slim iPod Nanos, like the ones I bought my daughters for getting good end of year school report cards. And which I didn’t mind buying because I love going to the Apple shop and looking around and writing them a fat check. In this respect, I’m a brand name sucker.

Obviously, I don’t need a new iPod. But I’m thinking, I could leave this one in the kitchen, in the iPod boombox, and then have a brand new, color, 80GB iPod for carrying around. You see, that would save me the huge hassle of ejecting the old one from the boombox, and putting it into the carrying case I have for strapping it to my left arm at the gym. Yes, it seems I really would pay $349 to cut out the bother of such a quick and simple task. Maybe I’ll get a third iPod for the car. And another one for the holiday cottage, even though we don’t have a holiday cottage.

There are no other brands or devices that seduce me this way, except possibly adidas t-shirts and training tops, which I think has something vaguely to do with the 1970s and my first ever football shirt. My iPod infatuation also goes back to my youth, when I dreamed of being rich enough to have a house with its own music room, and a giant jukebox that would play random tracks from my entire record collection, taking me by surprise at every new song.

I didn’t need to become rich. Apple invented something much better. All I’m doing is showing them my gratitude.