Two Year Date

Shown here wrapped in black rubber for your inner fetish. Rrrrr!

A beauty. It was so pretty in white, with easy to use buttons, especially its reasonably thin dimensions compared to any previous “full-size” iPods in the market. I just had to have one of these. Before long, I was busy downloading my entire music collection to this baby and I even went from chic-to-geek in my methods of searching for images (of the responding album covers) in order to prettify any song that was playing on my new Pod.

After more than a yearlong of drooling obsession in owning an iPod Video, I was “forced” to add this music-bank into my gadget arsenal. For I always dreaded that the day would come that upon synchronizing, I would encounter this tag-line: “Not enough space” in my existing 40 gigs Generation-3 iPod (circa 2002). It was time for a replacement, I said to myself. Especially after the battery would go awry for no apparent reason after a normal charging time.

True that you may debate that I wouldn’t need a replacement for this problem. Since my music collections were safely stored in a home computer already, I may as well just get a smaller (and cheaper) type of music player just to have a playlist-on-the-go (the gym, while driving, any waiting-in-line moments or whenever I felt like having an anti-social day). The thing is that I wouldn’t feel complete without bringing everything with me everyday. Because for me, for everything that happened in my life, be it at the office, the social life, with family, etc, there’s always a perfect song for everything. Just to accord to the spectra of my changing moods.

After some not-too-much deliberation moments of mine, (it was of course, more of a want than a need), they at last issued an Adira Finance credit for me to wed this little machine. Not bad, about $50 a month to be installed six times within the next six months. Thus it wouldn’t hurt my finances that bad in my monthly budgeting. That was the plan.

Plugging the Pod everyday into the car audio-system, I was pleased by its performance until I saw this article in Wired Test magazine recently that vexed me to an almost uncomfortable state of being. Kris Wagner wrote the article, “Built to Fail” that said “Of course no R&D department would ever admit to creating products that are intended to crash and burn. It simply a matter of when –our gadgets- will die. Manufacturers design technology to fail so you’re forced to upgrade regularly”

No wonder the warranty would cover up to two years of usage, since these little babies would literary die (while more expensive to fix than buy a new one) after the ripe age of two had flown away.

With that he added, “Companies that make low end products rarely bother to manufacture spare parts. Meanwhile, companies that make premium gear invest in the replacement parts needed to salvage broken machines.”

Why didn’t this article come across before I made the decision to get one? (And 5 more months to go in the installments!) Well maybe I just had to enjoy my 2-year-date with this Pod to the fullest.

Now don’t complain to the vendors if they make the prices of a Vertu or a Mobiado extremely unreachable to the masses. Why yes. I believe they’d stock some spare-parts in the back-room.

That was the bad news; the good news about obsolescence is actually a joy:
There’s always a reason to shop again.