Space Ritual

I’m not a great lover of Apple products. To me, they’re an over-priced triumph of style over function. Now, I appreciate that not everyone shares that view and they’re entirely entitled to their opinion. You can’t knock that kind of success, right?

Bearing that in mind, I was surprised that a recent announcement from the Cupertino Kids caught my eye. In fact it made me very happy. Having started this waffle off by saying that I’m not an Apple fan I have to admit that I own an iPod. The iPod Classic. No, I didn’t buy it, it was bought for me as a gift and the fact that the most efficient way to manage music on it is through iTunes causes me great pain. You try iTunes for Windows – it’s a horrible piece of software. Anyway.

The great thing that the iPod Classic has going for it is the amount of storage space it has – 160GB on the model I own. It’s about 3/4 full, all music, and has just over 14,000 songs on. When you consider that this includes 30 or 40 minute versions of things like Space Truckin’ and No Quarter (Google them if you don’t know them!) then that’s a lot of vibes, man. An entire music collection that 30 years ago would’ve taken a small room to hold, stored on something that’s about the size of a pack of 20 cigarettes. Do I need to carry 14,000 songs around with me? Am I going to listen to all of them before I get back home again? Obviously not. Don’t be silly. The point here is about choice. I don’t want to sit at home in the evening and load songs onto a low-capacity player, only to get onto a bus the next day and find that I fancy listening to something that’s not on there. If I own music ranging from Abba and Bach to Yost and ZZ Top why should I have to pick and choose in advance?

I hear you – “Spotify“, you cry. “Grooveshark“, said someone. There’s more than a few people there with Amazon Cloud Player placards as well. You can keep ’em. Cloud storage is all very well but it presupposes that I have constant access to some kind of internet connection and that if it’s not a Wifi network that I have a device with a truly unlimited data plan. That’s not always practical, possible or desirable. Internal storage. That’s what I want. Space.

Which brings me back to Apple and my iPod. If you’re looking for a high-capacity media player then your choices are limited. Just check. Go on, do some research. See? The iPod Classic is pretty much your only choice if you want to carry a shitload of music around with you. Fine, so I like that my iPod has deep pockets. The trend recently has been to the cloud. This is why I was so pleased to read that Apple has announced a 128GB version of the fourth generation iPad. Am I going to buy one? Hell, no. I wouldn’t want any kind of tablet computer. My point is that if a major player like Apple (and I’ll concede that that’s what they are) are launching a version of one of their flagship devices with that amount of onboard storage then there’s a fair chance that some of the others might just tag along. There’s a market there, clearly. It ain’t only me!

So, on this occasion, yay for Apple. Now someone bring out a 128gb micro-sd card that’ll go in my phone and I’ll be laughing.