Why the hell do people love things so much?
This article is a rambling mess…
Only poor people put any thought into things purchased for necessity. Food, water, housing, clothing, and transportation for most of us in the West are cheap and aren't a huge part of our budget. Oh, they may be in reality, but we still seem to have plenty of spending money. Even at the level of necessity, we find brand fanboys: people who swear by a certain brand of ramen, pasta, sausage, etc. At least at this level, it's easy to understand why a product might be loved more than another. Name-brand food products tend to use higher quality ingredients which results in superior flavor over the generic or lower-priced product. We're working towards understanding why people will blow Steve Jobs' corpse for a phone, in case you're wondering… there will be plenty of detours along the way.
Trader Joe's is one of my favorite things in the world. I don't even shop there, I just like what it is: it's fucking Aldi with a hippie spin put on it. Aldi is ghetto. It's cheap, focuses on store-brand products, and poor people shop there. When they thought about bringing the formula to America, they found the market already saturated, and so they changed it up. Here, our Aldi is a favorite among middle-class moms who will hemorrhage money to feed their kids things that the packaging claims are healthy.
There were mp3 players on the market before the iPod. This is an important thing to remember, but even more important is to remember that there were other options too. At the time, your car generally played AM/FM and CD. Cassette tapes if you were really unlucky, I guess. If you wanted to walk around with music, your options were CDs, Minidisc, and a variety of clunky mp3 players, which we'll get back to. The iPod didn't really kill off CDs because the ghost of that format still lives on. It's still used to transport software, it's still used for hard backups, the same sized disc is used in video players, and those video players can still play CDs from the 1980s. Minidisc is the true victim of the iPod and I'm slightly bitter about it, because I loved the fuck out of Minidisc…
Again, the times were far different. Portable music was either carry around a skipping, battery-eating CD player that played ONE CD's worth of music at a time or tapes (lol). Being able to burn compilations improved things, but that still left you changing out discs routinely. Minidisc, on the other hand, didn't skip. One AA battery lasted you the duration of a long flight, coming and going. The discs were small and you could carry around one little box with all the music you'd ever need. The awful downsides will seem completely barbaric to you here in the present… You had to record music onto it1). At least on mine. Later versions, not so much, but that was too little too late. You'd set up a playlist on your computer, plug your MD player into it, hit record, and let it record at night while you slept. Pathetic, I know. It's also mechanical. Things can break. I had to do surgery on my player and it never quite ejected discs the same…
I tolerated this quite awhile and it was just my love of the format. I liked being able to change discs to completely change the mood. I still think that's faster than bumbling through playlists… even worse, an iPod weighs more than a Minidisc player. How the fuck did this thing ever catch on, anyway? Oh yeah, capacity and an easy to use interface…. keep forgetting.
It's still odd to me that people flocked to purchase the iPod. What had we heard out of this company before this? A series of middling-to-OK and completely-incompatible-with-PC desktop computers popular with the graphic design set. Oh, and things like the Newton, a pointless copy of PDAs. No one liked PDAs at all, and Apple barged into the market and fell face first into it… they couldn't make this piece of shit concept any better was the thing. A PDA is basically a date/address book, but takes twenty times as long to put anything into it. With the added benefit of recalling information takes just as long, it still eats batteries, no power means no information, get it wet, it's gone forever, the kids get hold of it, everything is lost forever, etc. etc. etc. PDAs are worse than PAPER, for fuck's sake. And Apple tried to improve it and still failed…
I guess it was a good time to look for crappy technology to improve, though…
The first MP3 player I ever saw was powered by AAA cells, had a pathetic (64MB?) internal storage (expandable by SD cards? it may have predated those actually, so possibly expandable by some obsolete camera memory card), had a tiny LCD screen, and that was about it. You basically copied things into it and then played music by operating a series of shitty little buttons all placed too close together and impossible to differentiate in the dark. The screen, for what it was worth, which wasn't much because there was no backlight, displayed the file name of the song. Oh, and it wouldn't play variable bitrate mp3s or any other audio file format at all. Battery life was OK, but not stellar. You might want to bring some spares… This was one of many similar devices available. Every single one of them was lacking. They made the right choice taking aim at these devices…