Steve Jobs, iPods and TV in the bathroom

Well, it worked.

Or at least I thought it did. In my last column I called on the Princeton student body to protest Apple until they took the restrictions off streaming songs in iTunes. Last week, it looked like Apple was giving in when Steve Jobs called a press conference to announce that they were replacing iTunes 5.0 after only five weeks in operation. So that's what the five stood for.

The announcement was available to watch online, and I opened it with great excitement. My excitement quickly turned to horror as Steve revealed that the new iTunes had nothing to do with streaming and everything to do with adding videos to the iPod. As if to taunt me, he then demonstrated this new feature with a music video by U2 — the very band that I had called on my readers to boycott! Oh boy, this meant war.

Later, to rub it in, Steve called my dorm room.

"I'd imagine that you saw the press conference today. Let this be a lesson to you, don't mess with Apple," he said.

"You know who I am? You read my column?" I asked.

"Of course I do. And I've taken action. Don't you find it a bit strange that you were unable to get a ticket to see Bill Gates, one of the dullest men alive?"

"That was you. I knew it!"

"I had no choice. What do you think would happen if a man with your great technological ideas, ideas like gapless playback and unlimited streaming, made contact with Bill Gates? It would be the end of Apple as we know it. I can't let my company ... rot away."

He giggled, after which followed a lengthy, uncomfortable silence.

"But Steve, don't you see I love your company? I spend an unhealthy amount of time with my iPod. Literally ..."

Steve started crying, softly.

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"It's the record companies, Tom. They're big and they're mean and Ashlee Simpson and ..."

Steve hung up at this point, and since then I have been thinking about the video iPod that he had hyped so much earlier that day. As Steve breathlessly reported, Apple has made a couple TV shows and Pixar shorts available for a $1.99 download off of iTunes, which we can then watch on the new iPod. Basically what this means is that I can now watch "Desperate Housewives" while I'm using the bathroom. At last, my unlikely dream has come true.

But seriously, are we so starved for entertainment that we need to have a little miniature TV screen in our pocket wherever we go? America is already ridiculously full of TV's. The other day I was watching "Pimp My Ride," for example, and in this particular episode X-zibit installed a TV in the headrests of a truck with no backseats. He called these "hater screens" because their purpose was to let the "haters" driving behind the truck watch TV. I called them "hater screens" because they made hate what America has become.

As for other details, the new iPod has what you'd expect, but you wouldn't know that from the press releases. As Jack Shafer has pointed out in Slate, the media now treats every new Apple product as if it were the cure for cancer. I understand that USA Today isn't the most hard-hitting newspaper, but with the abundance of news right now, I fail to see how the release of a new iPod qualifies as a front page story. I also feel obligated to draw attention to their pitiful FAQ which answers such pressing questions as:

Q: Once I download the video, what can I do with it?

A: Watch it on your Windows or Macintosh computer or on the new iPods.

And yes, I realize that in writing two out of three of my columns this year about Apple, I have simply added to the deluge of press for an unworthy topic. Which is why I will devote my next column to the Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes pregnancy. When is the media going to pick this story up? Tom Knight is an economics major from San Juan Capistrano, Calif. He can be reached at ttknight@princeton.edu.