Pod People: Well I am now a pod person. I have been threatening to buy an MP3 player for a while now, and if you are of the Mac persuasion (which I am these days) it makes little sense to buy anything but an iPod to go along with iTunes. My first instinct was to get something a little out of the ordinary -- one of the funky color combos they offer at Colorware so that everyone would be buggin' over my stylin' gansta' ways.

Then I realized that I really have no idea if I will end up making use of this thing, or it will sit on my kitchen counter for a couple of years until I get around to selling it for ten cents on the dollar. So I decided to go low end. Not quite as low as the Shuffle; I really had difficulty with the idea of no display or arbitrary song and playlist specification. I ended up going the next step up to the silver Nano, with a whopping 2 gig.

Actually it is "whopping." I have ripped maybe 12 CDs at the highest mp3 quality setting in iTunes and have a little over half the iPod full. It'll do me for a while.

A nano is a wee thing, though, and you cannot help but fear, rationally or otherwise, that you will inadvertently snap it. So the first thing you have to do is go out and buy a case for it. (I found a good one at Circuit City for twenty simoleans). Sadly, that doesn't allay my other fear: that I will wash it. 'Til then, I be jammin'.

Interestingly, Apple has just released two new devices. One is called iTV, which allows you to play videos purchased through iTunes on your TV. Once all TV shows and movies, including extensive libraries of titles long gone, were available for purchase, I would have to re-evaluate my cable TV subscription, but for the time being I can't see using this.

The other is the long anticipated iPhone, which combines an iPod, a Blackberry, a PDA, and a (poor quality) camera into a single Apple-branded device. Like everything else from Apple it is hip, stylish, and cute. But it has problems. A) It is too big -- primarily, one supposes, because it needs a keyboard. B) It is too expensive. $499/$599 with the purchase of a Cingular plan. Yow. Unlock it'll probably be pushing a grand. C) It tries to do too bloody much, as do all such multi-function devices. I cannot imagine wanting to run my phone, iPod and Camera all off the same battery, never mind a blackberry if I had one. I can go days without recharging my individual devices, could I say the same with this thing?

I do like the lovely Apple touch-screen interface of the thing. Is it too much to ask for a simple, inexpensive phone that has the sweet interface? Probably. But I'm sure some clever Korean company will make a decent knockoff in time.

Of course, I probably griped about the iPod a few years ago and look at me now. My littlest iPod along with my littlest iBook are hanging in there, but by 2010 I'll probably have drunk the Kool-aid bought into more Apple gadgetry. Maybe I should buy some Apple stock in the hopes of making enough to cover future purchases.