iPod, Therefore I Am

Revolution in a white box 

Some revolutions are noisy and bloody (think French, Russian). Some revolutions are splashy if not bloody (think 1950's rock or 1960's sex revolution). Then sometimes the change is sneaky, furtive, quiet. You might just notice one day, something is different. And in the case of the Apple iPod, pleasantly so.

I'm a self-admitted gadget nut, and have desk drawers full of old Palm Pilots, Sony Mavica cameras and Windows CE handheld PC's. With most gadgets, you get the oh-wow factor of a new feature (e.g., color screen, new OS) and then become bored with it after a while. The musical capabilities of handheld devices prior to iPod were unimpressive. On handhelds and MP3 players, song lists were limited to the size of a storage card, and even then, with handheld PC's, you had to forsake other applications to load music. Then came Apple, circa 2001, with the idea of shrinking a 40 gigabyte hard drive to the size of a deck of cards. The other thing they did is make their gadget serve one master (music) well, instead of several masters poorly. When it first came out, I ignored the hype; I already had a huge CD collection, CD players in house and car, and good CD burning software. What need had I for an iPod? On a 3 hour trip to Austin, I can switch out CD's pretty easily.

Well here's a difference. The iPod holds my entire CD collection. My every whim, whimsy and mood change can be accommodated by this remarkable device. You can mix songs and playlists around in an endless variety of ways. We look at how we did music over the last 100 years - Victrolas, Hi-Fi's, plastic LP's, Eight Tracks and what not. My parents had a big Hi-Fi (maple wood finish) and a giant record cabinet to hold a small record collection (Perry Como and Johnny Mathis among others). I myself had LP's and CD's stacked to the ceiling in my bedroom at home. Now, it all fits in a shirt pocket and you can summon it in a snap. That is a revolution.

Have wondered - could they eventually do this with movies or television shows? It's bound to happen -- and there is justifiable concern for how these new devices will affect the music and entertainment industries. I tried Movielink recently -- the download took 1 hour on broadband, and I had to watch the movie within 24 hours, on my PC screen. While that's kind of kludgy and doesn't suit me, the momentum is there. I don't think the entertainment industry really has anything to worry about; new venues will replace the old. And small, white, innocuous little boxes will cause quiet revolutions when people realize what they can do.