I came, I saw, iPod

My original reason – well, my published excuse – was that I was going to get one for my daughter Demi, but naturally I ended up getting one for myself.

I’m speaking, of course, of the iPod, Apple Computer’s phenomenally successful portable music player, already the world’s most popular device of its kind. If you’ve never seen one, just think of a shiny white box the size of a pack of cigarettes with a wire and earphones sticking out of it. (The one I got was even smaller, the ultra-new iPod mini model just a shade larger than a credit card.)

As most of you already know to the extent that it’s coming out of your ears, I am a certified Apple and Mac maniac, and will happily do hard labor in the salt mines so I can buy anything with the logo of a white apple – missing one mouthful – on it. (To the uninitiated, Apple is the company, Macintosh is the brand, and iPod, iMac, and PowerBook are products.) More than two million iPods had already been sold around the world as of January 2004, and sales of the device are estimated to reach $1 billion for this year.

I have a little Mac museum at the back of the house, with specimens going back to the PowerBook 100 (circa 1991) and the cute-as-a-button Color Classic, maxed out at a hefty 10 megabytes of RAM – not to mention the obligatory Apple cap, sweatshirt, and T-shirt. I take my laptops apart for fun and therapy – there’s nothing more satisfying than returning about 40 parts and screws to their proper places, then hearing that startup chime at the first press of the power button – which, duh, doesn’t always happen. (I fancy that in another time, I might have been a watchmaker; oddly enough, I can’t do more with a car beyond changing a flat tire.)

I’m also what’s known as an early adopter, a guy who runs screaming to the nearest store five minutes after a geeky new product’s announced on the news. Every January, when Apple bossman Steve Jobs strides out onstage at the Macworld Expo to suggest five new reasons for me to clean out my bank account, I’m up at 2 in the morning (9 a.m. California time) with earphones plugged in to the live Internet feed. (After which, of course, I stay up until 4 to chat on-line with a dozen other Mac addicts about what we just heard.)

So it stood to reason that when the original iPod was announced by Apple in 2001, I should’ve dashed out of the gate to grab the first one on the shelves (or, as I often do, placed an order on-line at the Apple Store, for delivery to my sister in the US, then for Fedex-ing to me). But I didn’t. Miraculously, I held out for almost three long years – an eternity in cyber-time.

A good part of the reason could be that, while I love music as much as the next fellow, I never was a stereophile or audiophile, the kind of honcho who converts half of his car into a boombox, and whose idea of television is a screen the size of Laguna. I think I had a monoaural childhood, spent with transistor radios blurting out A Tear Fell and Gabi ng Lagim and record players with pop-up covers spinning 78-rpm renditions of Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.

The second reason is that, unusually enough for a geek, the iPod seemed to me to be a bit too much. The original 5-gigabyte iPod could hold about 1,000 songs – and I couldn’t even think of a hundred songs I really wanted to listen to, all the time. And then the iPod just kept getting bigger and bigger (only in capacity, not in size – and, of course, more expensive), until it reached 40 gigabytes, enough to house 8,000 songs, including all the Bulgarian folk tunes and "Zamfir and the Pan Flute" symphonies and Bayani Agbayani serenades you could throw at it. What was I going to do with all that space? (Actually, you can also use the iPod as an external hard disk, for back-up and storage of your desktop or laptop files; but I already had a back-up disk you could drive a car into.)

I might’ve gone on to my old age without ever touching an iPod – until the iPod mini came along. It’s almost ridiculous to imagine an even smaller version of the iPod, but there it was – feather-light, with that satin look that belies its anodized-aluminum toughness, with just enough disk space for 1,000 songs, and maybe a tad overpriced but what the heck, it was cuter than a baby’s butt. Announced (where else) at last month’s Macworld Expo, the Mini took America by storm, selling 100,000 units on a pre-order basis even before it hit the shelves.

And then again I never thought I’d see one for months – you can hardly get one in the States even now, if you drove all day up and down the Pacific Coast, and it isn’t due for release in the rest of the world until late April. But what do you know – someone in my local Mac group just had to have not one, but two of these babies, ordered early straight from the States; and he was disposing of both of them in the unopened boxes, because he’d changed his mind in the meanwhile and had decided to get a bigger iPod. So when he posted a "for sale" sign on our website, how could I resist?

Again, I said, "Okay, I’m going to get one for Demi," for the unica hija who’d been asking vaguely innocent questions about the iPod for some time now. Of course, when I saw the two of them, and how one was blue and the other silver, you know what happened – something had to give. (I think the banking term for it is "drawn against uncollected deposit" – meaning, someone’s going to have to pay for his toys by taking on some very un-amusing jobs in the near future.)

And here’s my mini-review of the Mini, comprehensible only to those who’ve handled an iPod: The scroll wheel is uncannily smooth – paperlike, your thumb just glides over it, and a light press gets things done. The silver is a perfect match (always a big factor with us Mackies) for the aluminum PowerBook. I’m not so sure I like the sharp edge top and bottom, although the smooth curved sides are very finger-friendly. I guess the sum of it is that I’m not missing one megabyte of the five extra gigabytes a few more bucks could’ve gotten me (the 10-gig iPod is still available); I have a lot of spare gigabytes elsewhere and don’t need them on the iPod. This one is so light it sits in my shirt (not pants) pocket without bulging or sagging. The tiny white earphones are a breeze to use, and the battery’s good for a whole day’s music.

The iPod automatically synchronizes with a neat program called iTunes on the Mac (it also works on Windows, folks). iTunes organizes your music into genres, artists, composers, and so on (actually, the program doesn’t do the organizing – you do). The neater your iTunes, the happier your iPod. This is where the anal side of me came to good use – I mean the classification of all the songs on my iTunes. I’m so anal that I even correct all the spellings and punctuations (lower case for prepositions, for example) of the song titles, both on the filename and in iTunes. So it was a breeze importing all the playlists and navigating through them. Thank God I have only 560 songs – including five versions of La vie en rose, two versions of Lupang Hinirang, and the University of Michigan Hail to the Victors fight song – so far. (Demi’s one humongous chunk of a playlist is something else... we’ll have to talk about this.)

As for the sound quality, all I can say is, the Sixties never sounded so good! I mean that literally, not just nostalgically – though it’s that, as well. Do you remember all those Saturday school dances where you slicked down your hair with Tancho Tique, clipped on a tie, and took one huge gulp of pineapple juice (or choked on your cheese pimiento sandwich) as the girl of your dreams sailed by? Remember how scratchy those hiss-and-pop turntables and auditorium speakers were? No, I guess we never noticed, as busy as we were making sparkling conversation over the windshield-wiper moves of Bus Stop.

Well, now I can tell you that Never My Love and Stairway to Heaven – as well as my all-time favorite album, Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano by Claude Bolling and Jean Pierre Rampal – never sounded so clear as they do on the iPod. It gets even better when I put on (or rather move my thumb down to) Hot Stuff, which strangely makes me feel like taking my shirt off (hmmm, must be that silly movie).

I suppose I could get fancy and claim that I was buying a cultural icon, an artifact worthy of scholarly investigation. Someone’s already done that, as a matter of fact, a fellow by the name of Dr. Michael Bull, a lecturer in media and culture at the University of Sussex, whom The New York Times describes as "the world’s leading – perhaps only – expert on the social impact of personal stereo devices." (Thanks to wired.com for this factoid, and the following quotes.)

Bull wrote a book on the Sony Walkman titled Sounding out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life and will soon publish its sequel, Mobilizing the Social: Sound Technology in Urban Experience (you just know it’s scholarly when you see those colons, don’t you?). This is what he had to say about the iPod:

"It gives them control of the journey, the timing of the journey and the space they are moving through. It’s a generalization, but the main use (of the iPod) is control. People like to be in control. They are controlling their space, their time and their interaction… and they’re having a good time. That can’t be understated – it gives them a lot of pleasure.

"So, for example, music allows people to use their eyes when they’re listening in public. I call it nonreciprocal looking. Listening to music lets you look at someone but don’t look at them when they look back. The earplugs tell them you’re otherwise engaged. It’s a great urban strategy for controlling interaction.

"It’s also very cinematic. The music allows you to construct narratives about what’s going on. Or you use it to control thoughts. A lot of people don’t like to be alone with their thoughts. The best way to avoid that is to listen to music.

"A lot of people don’t like where they’re going in the day. If you can delay thinking about that until the last minute.... People don’t take off their earplugs until the very last minute, until they’re inside the door at work. It’s a great way to control mood and equilibrium."

Now that may sound to you like something Dr. Bull produced in, uhm, the bathroom. But let’s not get anti-intellectual here, shall we? There’s enough of that out there, already, in this Season of the Jologs leading up to May 10. What was the title again of that "pababa nang pababa" song?

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Okay, my young friends, I realize that it’s March and therefore term-paper time. This explains why my mailbox is beginning to groan from the influx of the usual desperate requests from hapless Literature students for me to summarize the plot of this novel, discuss the symbolism of this image, and, heck, just write the damn paper.

Let me go through this one more time and broadcast my standard reply:

"Dear XXX, Many thanks for your message and for your interest in my work. As a teacher myself, however, I believe that the writer’s job is to write the story, and the reader’s to understand it. If I wasn’t clear enough about what I meant in the story, then I beg your pardon, and will try to do better with my next one."

Ah, summer in the city!

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.