Tag - apple

Having an iPod Nano can be a lot more work than you bargained for.

I got a fatboy Nano for Christmas. It’s great, sleek, beautiful, tiny, and the wretched bleeding thing does not hold all my music.

Having never had this problem before (owning both a 20GB 4th generation and a 30GB 5th generation of what is nostalgically now referred to as an iPod classic) this is causing me some serious angst. (OK, I’m lying about the angst part. Actually it’s just minor irritation, bordering on mid-level annoyance.) But in the wee, wee hours of the morning they really don’t feel too terribly dissimilar.

It turns out there is no easy way to tell the black-box machina Apple calls iTunes to “sync-up-all-the-music-that-fits-on-my-ipod, selecting-by-albums, giving-me-new-stuff (or at least a random sampling of all my music) every-single-time-I-sync.

I don’t know about you, but I find that distinctly annoying.

After all, my time is too valuable to spend manually figuring out what kind of music I want to listen to for the next few days. After spending 30 minutes on the worthless local paper, channel-surfing for an hour or so, and some impressive-looking but sadly resultless procrastination on household chores, the last thing I want to do is to make the computer do what it ought to do for me. It resembles work entirely too closely.

So: Apple. Please create a setting in the iPod prefs that does the above-mentioned task.

I would really hate to draw the conclusion that you are simply making it tough for people to own low-capacity iPods and engaging in some stealthy marketing for upmarket 160 GB versions … particularly when you’re releasing 8GB iPhones that would not hold my music collection either. That would just be cynical.

After all, if the geeks at ArsTechnica can’t figure it out either (and no, none of the suggestions there possess either of the two desired virtues of humane computing: elegance and … actual functionality), how can a mere mortal figure it out?

Thanks!