After trying the new iPod nano, David Pogue of The New York Times warned it was so great that customers would have to "lash [their] credit cards to [their] wallets like Odysseus to the mast" if they wanted to avoid buying it. Pogue also goes by the nickname Pogueman, and writes tech-themed song spoofs with lyrics like "America Online?/Your name's a fraud!/In AOL connection hell/Top speed is zero baud!", so it's not hard to imagine him getting a little too excited about technology.
But the Pogueman is not alone. Since the nano's release a couple of weeks ago, techno-geeks everywhere have been stumbling over themselves to heap praise upon the Apple's new MP3 player. Personally, I can't help but feel a little disappointed. As a reader of several Apple blogs, I had fallen for a rumor that the nano was actually a one-nanometer implant that blasted songs directly into your brain. The actual nano, it turns out, is cool but not that cool — like the Beastie Boys, but now and not in the early '90s.
What surprised me most, though, was Apple's marketing campaign for the nano. A year ago, when introducing the shuffle, they had made the mistake of comparing it to a pack of chewing gum. Faster than you can say "tort reform" people started suing, claiming that they had chewed on their shuffle, because they thought that it actually was a pack of gum. Now that the nano is out, Apple has made a specific point to compare its size to that of a #2 pencil, something that people not only chew on, but regularly stick in electric pencil sharpeners. I'm no legal expert, but the People of Mississippi vs. Apple Computer could well be the first great test for Chief Justice John Roberts.
Released on the same day as the nano, the new version of iTunes has also given me cause for anger. First some background: In past versions of iTunes you were able to stream other people's music libraries, listening to their music, but never actually downloading it to your computer. During my early college days I took full advantage of this situation by delving into all the classics: Beatles, Beach Boys, C+C Music Factory. Before long, I realized that my purpose in life was to build the ultimate library for others to stream from and admire. I spent hours classifying songs and debating the difference between hip-hop and rap, only to realize that white people lack the ability to distinguish between the two.
Having invested at least 300 hours into my cataloging efforts, you can imagine my rage when Apple ruined streaming with iTunes 5.0. Now when I try to stream music, I am informed: "The shared Music Library you are trying to access accepts only five different users each day." So that's what the five stands for. Well let me say something to the record companies that are almost certainly behind this. You can sue random members of our student body. You can break federal law by bribing radio stations to play your terrible songs. You can even release Hillary Duff's Greatest Hits two albums into her recording career. But when you take away our streaming, I get mad.
I assume that the rest of the student body feels the same way, so I'm going to serve as the orchestrator of our protest. The Frist protest was good practice for what we're going to do: The next time a U2 album comes out, we will all boycott it and let the record companies know why. They'll notice that the album only sold 750,000 copies instead of the 754,000 they were expecting. They will feel the iron grip of Princeton, and they will give us our streaming back. If you're wondering "why U2?" the answer is I hate them and they are a terrible, terrible band.
In the meantime, let's show Apple what they get for caving in so easily, and also for releasing an "iPod phone" that completely sucks. Don't buy a nano. If you've already bought one, don't despair; just send it to 350 Bloomberg, c/o Tom Knight's iPod Nano Protest. I'll be happy to take it off your hands. Tom Knight is an economics major from San Juan Capistrano, Calif. He can be reached at ttknight@princeton.edu.
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