iPod: Changing the way people listen to music

Make no mistake about it : The iPod is for people who love music; LOTS of music. Its an expensive gadget, starting at $300, and if you're a person who only listens to a dozen songs at a time... perhaps you buy maybe a new album of music once every 4 or 5 months or download a song once in a while, then the iPod may not be for you... However, that does not mean that you cannot change. :-) The theme in my review is that deep down in every single one of us, there is a music junkie, and the iPod can help unlock that.

DISCLAIMER:This review is extremely lengthy and detailed. I went into great detail, and tried to make it readable for the layman, but the review can be daunting at times. Instead of reading the entire review, I suggest quickly scrolling through it and reading the section titles in bold. Read the sections that interest you. More than anything, I'm trying to provide a valuable resource to people interested in the iPod. Still, if you can make it the whole way through, more power to you.

About Me
A little bit of an aside. Heh. That's right folks, I'm going to tell you about myself! In all seriousness, I think it is very important for the rest of this review. I absolutely believe that the iPod is the perfect product for me that it was simply meant to be... its like true love. However, it is not right for every music listener out there. I hope to give you all a bit of perspective of where I come from in reviewing this product.

Believe it or not, as little as 5 years ago, I really wasn't a big music listener. I didn't follow any bands, and I didn't listen to the radio much, so my tastes were extremely narrow. Basically I listened to songs that I'd come upon at random or were catchy. I never bought CDs, so my entire range of music maybe consisted of a few dozen random songs that I had as mp3s on my computer.

Then what happened? I'm not quite sure, but the combination of the rise of Napster and its ilk, and my new curiosity about the fragments of music I'd obtained made me a music lover very quickly. I began downloading a lot of music, but at the same time, I also became more willing to spend money on albums that were complete and didn't have the flaws that mp3s did. Indeed, at times, some may have labeled me a pirate.

So my music collection ballooned to many many gigabytes of music... DAYS worth... and then WEEKS worth... A considerable number of songs, let me tell ya, and from lots of different genres as well. Generally, my library consists of electronic, rock, and a bunch of other genres, but I digress. I listened to a lot of different music, and in one sitting I could easily go from electronic to classic rock, to who knows what... maybe some strange Japanese Anime soundtrack...

The Box
The iPod came in a shrink wrapped in a peculiar cube shaped box. Breaking into it, the black box folds out into 2 halves with the words "Designed by Apple in California" printed in grey text on the right half. What struck me more about this moment, even before opening the box any further, was how totally chic the box was. Not only that, but the smell was incredible: something analogous to new car smell. A clean but strong smell that I'm sure has something to do with the plastic wrappers or the packing material or the smell of the fabrication of the plastics in the iPod, but you could tell that Apple was going for a unique experience, even for opening the box. Here are the contents:
- iPod
- Dock
- Portable A/C charger
- 6 pin to Dock connector firewire cable
- Manual, warrantee information, software CD
- Black case, and cloth baggie
- Earbud style headphones, with 2 sets of earbud foams
- 6 pin to 4 pin firewire adapter.
- Inline remote control
- 2 Dock port covers

The Look, The Feel
Right now I'm holding the iPod in the palm of my hand. It definitely fits comfortably in just one hand, and being homo sapien, and having the remarkable opposable thumb that characterizes my species, I can reach each of the 4 buttons and the scroll wheel easily without the use of my other hand. The iPod is thinner than previous incarnations at only 0.62 inches. Combine that with the now gently rounded edges of the front of the iPod, and it is now easier and more comfortable to wrap your fingers around it. The dimensions of the iPod are similar to that of a deck of cards, except the 15 GB version is thinner than the deck of cards, and is longer.

In terms of weight, the new iPod is lighter than before, at only 5.6 ounces. The iPod is easily the lightest of all the hard drive based MP3 players out there. It is not lighter than most of the flash-based MP3 players however, and in that respect, it is less optimal for activities where those couple of ounces count (like running a marathon or working out in general). As an "executive" digital music player... for all those yuppies out there who may work out, its small, compact, and light enough.

Apple has worked so hard at miniaturization that the iPod itself even approaches the size of the original and venerable Rio 300 32 MB flash player... a remarkable achievement for something that has a physical hard drive.

In terms of looks, the iPod continues to be absolutely radiant. The back is still chrome polished to a mirror finish, and the front is white encased in Lucite. The top half of the iPod's front is the home of the iPod's big display. Text is easy to read, and when it is dark, the screen glows a pleasant blue with the backlight on. The new button formation however, may be the most dramatic visual change. Instead of forming a circle around the scroll wheel, they have been moved up to just below the display. Because they are not physical buttons, all the buttons look like shallow circular cut outs in the plastic. Furthermore, when the backlight in activated, the new iPod's 4 buttons glow softly red. When I first saw product photography of the new iPod I thought the pictures looked so computer generated because the buttons looked unreal. Now, holding it in my hand, the whole iPod still looks unreal... it's like holding a 3D concept rendering. It's absolutely amazing. The iPod has the look.

The downside? The surfaces of the iPod, both front and back, are extremely susceptible to scratches. I've seen iPods in such bad physical condition (still working, just scuffed up) that you can barely read the text on the screen because of the scratches. Not only that, the back attracts fingerprints like mad. I warn you... owning an iPod means spending time absolutely obsessing over how it looks. I find myself wiping off fingerprints all the time, and using a cleaner to buff out scratches. It's a losing battle, I'm sure, but one still has to try! :-)

You've got the touch...
... you've got the power! The buttons on the iPod are not buttons in the conventional sense. Instead, they are all touch sensors like the touchpad on a laptop. They respond to the presence of your fingers because your fingers cause a capacitance change. Apple did this for a number of reasons. First of all, it's COOOL. No doubt! It makes the device feel very... Star Trek. Secondly, with no moving parts, it serves to make the iPod thinner and smaller. Thirdly, it solves the problem of buttons wearing out, getting dirty, and having a weird response... the buttons, in a sense, have NO response at all, other than Newtonian response... every action has an equal and opposite reaction, so it pushes back at your finger with the same force.

Flaws? It depends on how you press down on the buttons. I found that if I jabbed at the buttons with my fingertips, exposing very little surface area to the sensors, the button would not work. You actually have to press it with the flat part of your finger. In other situations, the buttons are actually far too sensitive. Brushing your palm across the front of the iPod will surely activate something you didn't mean to. Putting it in your pants pockets may do the same. Luckily, in those cases, the iPod has a Hold switch on the top.


Jack In
The once standard 6 pin firewire port has been replaced by a different port now on the bottom on the iPod. The new connector is a thin connector that has other thoughtful implications (more on them later). However, the choice to use a proprietary connector means that you can no longer use a regular 6 pin to 6 pin cable to connect to the iPod. When you're on the road, you must be sure to bring along the included cable, or you will not be able to charge or connect to any other computer.

Early iPods with the 6 pin port had a very nasty flaw. There were reported cases where strain caused by normal plugging and unplugging would break important solders inside the iPod and render the port, and the iPod useless. The new port and connector solve that issue. The connector hooks in very gently with little force, and releases easily with a squeeze.

The move of the port from the top of the iPod to the bottom also facilitates the brand new iPod Dock, which comes standard with the 15 GB iPod. The dock has the same port as the iPod in back, so basically you'd hook the dock to your computer with the same cable, and drop the iPod into the dock to sync. The dock holds the iPod upright at an angle similar to PDA cradles.

The other end of the included firewire cable is a 6 pin firewire connector that will hook into all modern Macs and some PCs. Most PC laptops have instead the smaller 4 pin firewire port, so Apple includes a 6 pin to 4 pin adapter.

Power and Battery Life
The iPod has always had a non-replaceable internal lithium-ion battery. Sorry, your AAAs won't work here. The original iPod had battery life of more than 10 hours of continuous play. The new iPod, sadly, is advertised to have only 8 hours of battery life, and it gets more or less that figure. This decrease in battery life is a direct compromise for the smaller and lighter form factor. While the previous iPod had a larger battery, Apple went with a physically smaller battery with 20% less capacity for the sake of miniaturization.

Charging the iPod's battery is a simple matter. If you connect the iPod to the computer with a 6 pin Firewire port, the iPod will charge. This is really quite nice, especially with the dock. This elegantly kills 2 birds with one stone. You need to hook the iPod up to your computer anyway to transfer songs... now it charges without your having to think about it over one cable.

A warning. If you have a computer with a 4 pin Firewire port, you will not be able to charge your iPod while connected to your computer. The reason is simple; those missing 2 pins carry power. In this situation, you must make sure you charge the iPod the second way.

The other way to charge the iPod is with the included iPod AC power adapter. This small white brick on one side has a 6 pin firewire port. On the other side is Apple's "duck-head" connector. The duck-head is the exact same design as the connector on the power brick for the 2002 - 2003 iBook and Powerbook laptops. (in fact you can even remove the duck head part and interchange them) I'll describe the duck-head. The two prongs for the power socket are collapsed into the power brick for transport. To plug it into the wall socket, just flip down the two prongs (they'll snap down) and plug the entire brick into the socket. It's compact, elegant, and functional! It is dripping with Apple "nice touches." With the brick plugged into the wall, you can use the same cable that you use to hook up with the computer with the brick because, like I said, there is a 6 pin firewire port.

The power adapter is small and unobtrusive enough to carry around on longer trips.

Capacity and format
*puts on reading glasses* "Holds over 3700 songs at near CD quality on 15GB hard drive," reads the first line on the bottom of the iPod's box. 15GB is the capacity of the iPod. Where does the figure of 3700 songs come from?

3700 was found based on an average song length of 4 minutes (not 3700 classical symphonies obviously) and compression using the new Advanced Audio Codec at 128 kbits/sec. This new audio codec, AAC for short, was recently put into iTunes as an option. AAC was developed at Dolby and is used as the MPEG-4 audio codec. Apple is investing heavily in MPEG-4, and thus it found its way into iTunes. AAC is of significantly higher quality for the same bitrate as MP3, and rivals the audio CD's quality at 128 kbits/sec. (for those who are familiar, at 128 kbits/sec previously, MP3 was acceptable, but you would be able to hear very audible "warbling" as if the sound were coming from underwater). Not only that, but 128 kbits/sec AAC audio files are also the format of choice for the brand new iTunes Music Store. Music that you bought on the music store can be loaded and played on your iPod.

AAC and the iTunes Music Store, however, are as of this time, not available from MusicMatch, so you would not be able to load those music files on the iPod from a PC. Other formats that are supported by the iPod are MP3, WAV, AIFF, and Audible, the format for Audible.com, which provides top-notch audiobooks that you can play on the iPod.

Computer Sync (Mac)
Setting up, loading music onto, and maintaining the music on the iPod is exceptionally simple on the Mac. On the Mac, Apple's own in house digital music software, iTunes 4.0, was designed from the ground up with the iPod in mind and thus the entire experience has been extremely streamlined.

The first time you connect the iPod to your Mac, iTunes will automatically launch and send you to a simple wizard that will ask you to name your iPod and ask you whether you want to automatically sync with iTunes.

This is not a review of iTunes, but since iTunes is so very essential to the managing of music on the iPod, I have to talk about the different options that can be configured in iTunes.

If you answer "no" for that initial wizard sync question, your iPod will appear in iTunes and will have no music on it. You will have to manually add music to it by dragging and dropping. If you answer yes, iTunes will attempt to synchronize your music collection with it. That is to say, it will copy all of your music onto the iPod.

Personally, I have just a wee too much music for the 15 GB iPod. In that situation, iTunes will sync as much of it that it can. This solution seemed unsatisfactory to me. Fortunately, there is a 3rd sync option. iTunes will also let you sync particular playlists to the iPod.

Every time the iPod is attached to the computer, if it is sync mode, any new changes will be added to the iPod immediately. Suppose you rip a new CD that you just bought, or bought some music on the iTunes Music Store recently, or downloaded new music somewhere (thief!! just kidding :-P ). If the music is in iTunes, it will be on the iPod the next time it's plugged in.

So how fast does this all happen? The iPod connects to computers with firewire, as I've mentioned before. Firewire is a fast connection, capable of up to 400 mbits/sec or roughly 50 MB/sec. This means you can transfer music to the iPod as fast as if it were just another hard drive (in fact you can even set it to be just another hard drive... more later). To fill the iPod in one sitting with 15 GB of music (3700 songs), it will take about 35 minutes. To put 1 full album on the iPod : about 10 seconds.

Finally, there is an option to use the iPod as a Firewire hard drive. In case you do not go crazy and fill up the entire capacity of the iPod with music, you can use that extra space that's left over to store files. The iPod appears on the desktop just like another disk, and you can drag files into it. When you're at some other Mac, you can plug it in and access your files.

Last year my inkjet printer broke, but I still needed to print out some important papers for a class. Instead of putting the documents onto a floppy disk, or emailing the files to myself, I dropped them onto my iPod. When I went to the computer lab, I hooked my iPod up to one of the Macs they had there and printed my files from my iPod.

Computer Sync (Windows)
On the PC, there are more options to connect the iPod to the computer than there are on the Mac. Windows iPod users can use the same Firewire connection if they have it on their PCs with the same transfer speed. For PCs that do not have Firewire, the new iPod has USB 2.0 support built in as well.

There's a few catches though. At the time that I am writing this review, Apple has yet to release the essential USB cable and the iPod firmware update that will make this possible. Second, if your computer does not have USB 2.0 but USB 1.1 instead, the iPod will still work, but transfer at a significantly slower speed. To load 15 GB of music may take LONGER than one night. It may very well take a huge chunk of one entire day to transfer it all. It is important to note that because Apple has yet to make this option available (on the box, Apple says that its "coming soon") so I have no first hand experience with USB.

As of the writing of this review (June 2003) Apple does not write their own software for loading the music onto the iPod. Instead, a custom version of MusicMatch Jukebox 7.1 is included on the install CD-ROM.

MusicMatch pales in comparison to iTunes. It is as simple as that. Having used iTunes to manage my music for a long time, trying MusicMatch on my PC was an unpleasant step down. The interface is horribly cluttered, with way too many windows. Again, this is a review of iPod, not of MusicMatch, so I'll focus on how it syncs with the iPod.

MusicMatch functionality is the same idea as iTunes on Mac. You can have MusicMatch synchronize your selected playlists. MusicMatch, however, is not as elegant as iTunes, so important but simple things are cryptically hidden in menus. For example, to access the options or even do a simple thing like disconnect the iPod in MusicMatch, you must go to the "File menu", to "Send to portable device." It's not really intuitive why the iPod settings are there, but alas, there they are.

Clearly, Apple needs work on getting iPod's Windows software up to the standard that their iTunes software has become. There is hope, however. Because of Apple's new and hyped-up iTunes Music Store, a Windows version of iTunes may very well be on its way... no later than year's end. If this is true, then Windows users will finally have the streamlined and elegant syncing that Mac users have enjoyed for years with their iPods. Quite an Xmas present for all you Windows iPod users.

iPod's User Interface
So now you've got all your music on your iPod... *whistles* NOW WHAT? Play music, duh! Go out for a run... do dishes... commute... anything! Enjoy your music while you're doing it. But wait... there's one last concern! If you have 3700 songs on your shiny new iPod, how on earth are you going to find the one you want to play?

No worries. The iPod's single strongest strength is Apple's exceptional and oft copied user interface. I'm going to try to describe it, but like many things, it's harder to describe precisely than to actually use it.

The top line of the iPod displays the play status (playing, paused, or none), the current menu, and the battery level.

All navigation with the iPod is done with 5 buttons (Rewind, Menu, Play/Pause, FF, and Select) and the scroll wheel. The iPod display displays 5 lines of text. The "cursor" of the iPod inverts the text of one of those lines. Selecting an option on any screen is as simple as using the scroll wheel to move the cursor up and down, and tapping the select button at the center of the wheel.

The main menu of the iPod consists of Playlists, Browse, Extras, and Settings. Selecting any of these options moves you down into a deeper level. The new menu transitions in, wiping from the right to left. To move up a level in navigation in any menu, press the Menu button.

The Browse menu gives the option of viewing all the music on the iPod categorized by Artists, Albums, Songs, Genres, or Composers. With 3700 songs, its very very likely that you may have hundreds of albums... dozens of artists... It would still take an extremely long time to navigate through those lists... However Apple wisely added something to the scroll wheel that makes going through long lists of thousands of songs fast and efficient. The scroll wheel is accelerated. Move your finger around the wheel faster, and the menu flies by at light speed. You can be at the very bottom of a 3700 song list from the top of the list in a second. Move it slower, and it becomes more precise and you can select exactly the song you want.

Select a song from either the Playlists or Browse menus and the screen changes to the Now Playing screen, and the song starts playing. From the Now Playing screen, the name of the song, the artist, and the album are displayed. A horizontal bar on the bottom filling with grey from left to right represents the progress of the song. Below are 2 numbers. Elapsed time, and time remaining. The scroll wheel, in the Now Playing screen, functions as a volume control. Tap the select button once, and the scroll wheel will instead function as a scrubber, so you can go to anywhere in the song.

And that's it. The iPod user interface in some detail. If anything of what I described sounds hard at all, it's not. Go to a store. Bug a friend who has an iPod. Get someone to show it to you and try the interface yourself. It's simple and elegant.

Playlists
Playlists are pretty simple on the iPod. They're just what their name suggests: lists of music. The most common kind of playlist that you can have on your iPod is the static kind that you load from your computer. You decide what songs you want on the playlist when you're in front of your computer, and then it ends up on your iPod. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the iPod user interface that facilitates changing these playlists at all. Until you go back to your computer, your playlist will remain the same.

Apple finally introduced a new kind of playlist with the brand new 2003 iPods. At the bottom of the Playlists list is the On-the-Go playlist. This is a playlist that you don't build in front of your computer, but right there, wherever you are, on your iPod. It's simple. Navigate to a song, an album, an artist, even another playlist. Hold down the Select button for a few seconds. The name of that will flash. That has been added to your on the go playlist. On the go is excellent for those times when you feel absolutely spontaneous and want to listen to a specific combination of songs.

Flaws. Only one playlist is on-the-go, so don't expect to build 2 or 3 distinct playlists and have them saved. And lastly, the on-the-go playlist is not saved to the computer when you synchronize. In fact, for some bizzare reason, the on-the-go playlist is blanked out the next time iPod is connected to the computer.

Misc
This is stuff that doesn't really fall into any notable category, but are definitely worth mentioning.
- The new iPod dock has another port on the back: an audio line out. When you have the iPod cradled in the dock, this can be used for output. It completely bypasses the iPod's built in amp, so the volume adjust will not work, but is an answer to audiophiles, who would rather use their own amps on this output.
- The black case that comes with the 15 GB iPod basically sandwiches the iPod snugly when you slide it in. Its pretty sleek with a belt clip, but is flawed because when in the case, you cannot access the controls at all. Instead, you are expected to use the remote.
- The in-line remote consists of 4 buttons (vol up, vol down, ff, rw, play/pause) and a hold switch for the remote. The standard iPod headphones plug into the top of it. The remote has a much more secure connector than the remote for the last generation of iPod, but still has one flaw: when the iPod headphones are plugged into it, the combined cable is extremely long and messy.
- Star ratings. Mac users who use iTunes can now rate their songs from 1 to 5 stars right on the iPod. From the Now Playing screen, tap the select button twice.
- Games. The iPod comes with 3 games: brick, solitaire, and parachute. They are nothing to sneeze at, but for most people, these games are irrelevant.
- Notes, Clock, Calendar, and Contacts. The iPod comes with these 4 things that give it PDA type features. The iPod works with standard vCard and vCalendar formats, as well as Apple's own Address Book and iCal software through iSync. Also, the clock has an alarm feature that can either emit an audible beep or play a specified playlist. These features are under Extras, and therefore, can be irrelevant to people who already have other devices like PDAs. To me however, it's handy to be able to pull up a contact or my calendar or a quick note while I'm listening to my mp3s because that usually the closest device I have to me. Sadly, the iPod lacks the ability to edit notes, calendars or contacts.

About Me, Part 2 (ie. Conclusion)
Back in 2001, Apple released the original iPod in a relatively stagnant market of mp3 players. Flash memory based mp3 players were popular, but I didn't want one. Having amassed so much music, 128 MB seemed like an awfully small amount. Choose 2 albums worth out of the hundreds that I had? Unlikely. Hard drive based mp3 players surely did exist back then. The pioneer, the Creative Jukebox, had a whopping 6 GB (and soon more) of space to put music. What about those? I thought it was a great concept, but after thinking about it and seeing one up close, I (and many others) dismissed it as a novelty item. It was the size of a CD player and heavier than one. I could only fit it in my pocket in the winter in my big snow jacket. To top that off, but you had to let it sit there overnight to transfer music to it (USB 1.1, go fig). Hardly worth the effort. Finally... how would I even go about finding the song I wanted out of that 6 GB of music? More than likely I'd just end up playing the first songs and neglecting the songs at the end. I considered it, but I didn't want one.

Apple's iPod addressed all these glaring problems with hard drive mp3 players. Faster transfers, autosync, great interface, small size... and this was all in their first attempt. They priced it at $400... the same price as the current 15 GB iPod. I balked at the price, like many of you probably are now, because I was a starving student. That was a lot of money, after all. It didn't occur to me until I saw one up close and got to play with it. I was a music lover, and this device was built for me from the ground up. I bought it and I enjoyed it for a year and a half. It only allowed my love of music to grow. I got into more music, because it became a tool that made it so easy to. A month ago I traded in my 5GB iPod for the new 15 GB iPod. I find myself loving music more than ever.

People have loved music for as long as we've been able to hear, and Apple is going for a small revolution here. Even if you're someone who's not really good with computers and doesn't hoard digital music like me, you can be a candidate for the iPod. If you're someone with racks and racks of old CDs you love but never listen to anymore, then the iPod is for you. Rip them... mix them, put them on your iPod. Enjoy them anywhere. The new iPod appeals to more people than ever, and for good reason.

Song playing on iPod at end of writing : The Beatles - Here Comes the Sun