Just bought an iPod Touch

I just made my first ever Apple purchase: the Apple iPod Touch. The motivation for this is that I wanted some kind of fun technology that may also prove reliable for light productivity activities, such as email checking and such. Having recently celebrated my Ph.D. convocation, I thought it was time to splurge on something fun.

I picked up the 8GB model for $198.99 CDN from the local Future Shop, and I also got a leather carrying case at $34.99 CDN to minimize screen damage and such. The sales clerk was nice enough to throw in a $12 screen cleaner kit for free.

Thew new iPod and leather case.

A shot of the packaging after iPod was removed. The sticker was holding the claw together, keeping the thing from being removed

Is this a dock, or am I missing something? And why is there a "16" on the side?

When I get home to unwrap the new toy, I spent a good while trying to figure out how to open the box. I felt very old to be picking at the casing and be confused. Once I gave it my full attention, I saw how there were stickers and such which locked the weird claw grasping thing. Once the sticker was removed, it was straightforward to remove the iPod from its holder.

I get into the lower compartment, where manuals, disclaimers, and (oddly enough) Apple logo stickers can be found. I suppose when you’re buying an Apple product, you’re also paying for the rights to shamelessly show off your support, and are buying into the image that is Apple. I considered placing the Apple stickers on my toilet, and using a Sharpie to write in the product name “iFlush” on the side, but I abstained.

Along with the manuals and paperwork, I find earbuds, a USB dock cable, and this odd plastic thing. It looks like a cradle of some sort, where the iPod-end of the USB cable can fit through it, and the butt of the iPod can be inserted into the groove, but I have no idea how or if this thing should stand on its own.

I read through the disclaimers, where it lists off a whole bunch of things you should never do while using the iPod. I was reminded of the Happy Fun Ball skit from Saturday Night Live. It even goes on to imply that if you (think you) have electromagnetic hypersensitivity, you should limit use of the wireless features.

Once I’m satisfied that this thing doesn’t want me to use it when I do anything other than breathe, I move on to the “Start here” treasure map. It tells me to download the iTunes software. After no less than three EULA-like things for me to read and agree to before proceeding, I finally get to the point where I am to connect the iPod. Some more popups and such. I decide to name the iPod “Phobos”, after the Greeek god of fear. I tell it to not automatically sync anything, and to ignore registering for now.

Finally, after all is said and done, I get some status panel showing off hardware and it’s status. Down at the bottom, I see a quaint little percent bar that reports my memory usage. What especially catches my eye is the capacity, reported at 7.01 GB. And of that capacity, only 6.83 GB is free for use, what with all the existing software already soaking up 182.8 MB. That’s about 15% less usable capacity than what they advertised. If you let it slide that the device needs over 180 megs to play music, that’s still about 12% less overall capacity than they advertise.

So at this point I decide that it’s worth a little passive aggressive rant about this device. Apparently people at Apple don’t know how to count, or they feel that they can round up to the next highest integer whenever they advertise a capacity. Now, I have seen the use of 2^10 rather than 10^3 in computer lingo to describe order of magnitude jumps in units (eg 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes, 1 gigabyte = 1024 kilobytes, etc.), but this would only stand to underinflate the reported amount, rather than overinflate it. And if, for some crazy reason, the iTunes software is reporting 1 gigabyte = 1024 megabytes = 2^20 kilobytes = 2^30 bytes, then the actual number of bytes would still fall short of 8 GB by about 300 MB.

Ok, rant over. I suppose I should spend some time actually using it and getting used to it. Who knows, I might actually come to like it. If not, then it will make a great graduation gift for my wife.

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