It is over priced. The sound quality is not the best. The supplied headphones are poor quality and uncomfortable. The battery life is short. It crashes. It is very easy to scratch/damage. It locks you in to a proprietary format. If it goes wrong it is virtually impossible (and very expensive) to mend. The PC software is not very easy to use. These are not my comments. They come from Amazon reviews. The weird thing is that everyone who has got one loves it, and everybody else seems to want one. Of course it is the ipod.

Some time ago I read a book called "West of Eden". It is a very readable account of Apple and has good coverage of how Steve Jobs works. Many of the people in the book spoke of a "reality distortion field" which Steve can generate which makes people buy into his dreams and ideas. I kind of wonder if what is happening at the moment is a kind of larger scale version of that. Now I don't want to (daren't) knock the device (how could I) but I do find it intriguing that it has got such a following. 

Perhaps Apple have found a way to encapuslate "want one" into a product. Perhaps it is that when you open the box you find inside a piece of paper with "Enjoy" written on it. I've no idea. It will be very interesting to see if it can survive when people like Sony start marketing their versions.

I'm not particularly agin the ipod or Apple, but I do find it amusing that their adverts now target music copying teenages who try to "beat the system". Twenty years ago their famous "1984" commercial featured someone doing just that. And I wonder how an admittedly good looking product can achieve dominance without being that much better than all the rest.

Of course, you could just put all this down to ipod envy on my part.....