What to do, what to do?

[dreamshark]

I've been intending for a long time to upgrade from my beloved old iPod shuffle to a Nano. The 3rd generation Nano was released on my birthday, so I figure it's time.

Now I'm faced with all these decisions! Do I really need 8G of memory? Probably not, but I'm sick of silver, so I think I'll go with the high-end one anyway. Maybe I'll want to play movies on it or something (highly unlikely, but who knows?).

Okay, that gives me a choice of colors. Only 4, but I like them all! Should I go with black (goes with everything), turquoise (my favorite color, but does not go with everything), or Save-the-Africans red (exuberant and fun, plus socially conscious)? Even worse... this little honey comes with up to two lines of free engraving on the back. OMG, what do I do with that?? My name? A clever slogan or quote? Or just name the iPod itself? (not as inane as it sounds - iTunes makes you give a name to each device that it might be connected to).

I was all set to place the order, but now I'm paralyzed by the responsibilities of Consumer Choice.

Comments

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Geeze. Half the fun of Apple products was that the hardware was cool out of the box, and you personalized the OS. Now, they've gone MTV. FWIW: Go with your favorite color and don't worry about fashion. Engrave your url or some identifier in case you lose it.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

If you get eight gig of memory, it's very likely that you will eventually find a use for it. There's a lot of good music out there. (Plus photos, movie clips, etc.)

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I'm not used to the idea of putting my whole music collection on the thing I carry around with me. The shuffle lifestyle is different - you just wipe everything out and load new stuff on every day.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Nano is better: you don't have to load new stuff every day; you just select play lists from your whole library.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Well, maybe. Even 8G isn't enough for my full library, so I'll still have to decide somehow what subset to put on the Nano. We'll see how it works out. At the very least, I will now have a way to keep my music separate from the podcasts and the audio books.

[laurel]

Go with color, but that's always my answer. :-)

If nothing obvious springs to mind to have engraved on it, name or email address or some other identifier might be good. Or a name for the iPod.

"paralyzed by the responsibilities of Consumer Choice"

[nancymcc.livejournal.com]

"Paralyzed by the responsibilities of Consumer Choice" is a great summation of how I use far too much of my brain bandwidth. I try to turn it into a positive and use it as a technique of acquiring Less Stuff.

In terms of memory... what about putting Address Book and Calendar on the iPod? I keep meaning to check out this supposed capability (not for editing 'em obviously, just for lookup). I suppose these don't need much memory. Do you know anyone who does this?

In terms of Red... I read that the participating companies have spent way more promoting the Red concept (I remember lots of print ads for it a while back) than ever ends up going to charity. However, when I had a choice, I got Red because the donation comes out of the corporate pocket, not mine.

My red iPod is wrapped in a $4 stretch-bumper case, which was on clearance because it's a hideous translucent gray-brown. It looks even worse over red. I had some vague notion of ugliness as theft deterrence. Or anti- conspicuous consumption. Or something... I guess its appearance reflects my ambivalence about owning a trendy device. Much like the awful red paint on my embarrassingly large house.