ID:3707
 
$199, you say? $199 my fanny! I could buy a PS2 for that kind of money. Call me when they're $30.
RIGHT ON!
Yeah.....That.....They used to be like, $300 or something.....Not good!
All Apple Items are expensive, personally I've had mine working great for 2 years(It's a fifteen gb) so at least you know that it'll keep up, the reason they can sell for so high is because they have a "cult" mentality following. But personally I love it... mind you i got it as a gift.
Damn you questioning our capitalist values! Purchase and be happy! Do not question!

heh.

Yeah, they're overpriced junk, just like most items that have borne the Apple logo. (I had to use awful Macs to do Journalism work in high school. It amazed me how people thought they were the top end of publishing despite their horrible unreliability, instability, and general crappiness. Even the slightly "inferior" PC publishing stuff was better, IMHO, because of the greater stability. Nothing pissed me off like staying up until 3:00 AM redoing a page that the Mac somehow ate, garbled, froze, or threw up on. Heck, manually laying out pages was often less painful...)

Expect lower priced alternatives that blow them out of the water.
Mmm well they've been going strong for 4 years now, no I'm not an apple cultist, all my computers are pc's, But I think the Ipod is a great product if a little overpriced.

Plus you get the feeling that you only get when listening to an Ipod, kinda like your part of the club.

(If that matters to you that is.)
Wow, I'm surprised to see such biased and uninformed bashing coming from you, Jmurph. :)

I don't want to turn this into a Mac vs. PC flamewar (since that wasn't the original topic), but I'm willing to bet that the machines you used in high school bore no resemblance to current Macs except in logo and name only. That was probably the days of OS 9 or earlier, which was about on par with Windows 3.1 in features and stability (ie, terrible). Things have changed dramatically in the last 4 years.

On to the topic at hand, iPods suck. I wish people would stop buying them. And after realizing this comment would be longer than a typical blog post, I blogged.
Yes, my unreasoning hatred for all things Apple transcends my usual level personality :-)

I have no doubt they have improved (could they get worse?). And yet, I still cannot see any evidence that they are comparable to PCs. Every category pf software seems to favor PCs (and don't gimme that Macs are better for graphics or sound line; there are special industry workstations designed for those). Even the much touted OS X seems subpar to Linux for stability.

And you give my age too much credit- high school was more than 10 years ago for me! But my seething hatred remains....

I recognize my emotion taints this, so I generally stay out of PC v. Mac debates.

OTOH, if Macs offered reasonable prices and good software support, I could probably get over my loathing long enough to use them. Heck, they are just machines, after all, and I don't take it that seriously ;-)

Oh, and I still think IPODs are junk. They seem to run an unusually high rate of component failure for electronics (especially premium priced electronics). The software seems to have some real issues, though constant updating seems to fix that somewhat (though the installer seems to continue to suffer from mysterious failure). Conversion to Windows machines, an advertised feature, seems lacking badly.

All for $200.

No thanks.
Yeh, I hate it when companies like that overprice their items. I can understand for some software/hardware because that stuff probably took one hell of a team of developers to make it, but the Ipod? It's just playing and organizing MP3s, isn't it? That doesn't seem all that more advanced than a CD player, just in the fact that it is more efficient and such.
Jmurph, my main experience with Macs came in high school and college (1984-1992) and due to that experience I held them in similarly low esteem for a long, long time. Recently, however, when my parents' Windows machine started (er, continued) getting flaky, I did some homework and surprised them with... the Mac Mini!

That was late April, I think, and months later they are still delighted with it (even without benefit of the expansion memory Mike H recommended). Of course they're not exactly power users -- email, web browsing, and viewing photo CD's from relatives are the primary applications -- but finally they're able to do it painlessly.
Painlessly, eh? Well that is one more thing than Windows can claim at least! Can't be any worse than those garbage E-Machines, either....
iPods have sharp edges. :(
Elation-"iPods have sharp edges"

Thats why children like you dont have one >.> you might bite it... or somthing worse! oh no
Apple software used to pay the closest attention to details. When that disappeared, they lost any chance of getting me as a serious customer.