"that my life is solely about listening to tunes I bought from Apple's store."

Dude, thats so wrong.

Any mp3, ripped CD, limewired etc tunes play fine on the pod.

Yoyo -- of course, you can put any mp3 on an iPod, but despite my obvious hyperbole in the line you quoted, my criticism still stands. The iPod is about making you consume more. It's a crippled, one-way device.

"But [iPods] are crippled by design and I won't buy one until they aren't."

You are completely missing the point. The iPod has succeeded because it's dead simple -- pleasant to use for what 97% of its buyers actually want to do. It has nothing to do with denying people functionality; it's about making the critical functionality work best. That's why it's such a success.

To me, the Archos user interface is unbearable. It may work for you, but it is completely unsuited for the mainstream.

Kim,

I'm not missing the point, nor would I try to argue that the Archos user interface even approaches the graceful design of the iPod.

But it is just simply laughable to say that the critical functionality of listening to digital music would be crippled by adding an extra menu item for recording under say the "Extras" main menu heading.

I fully appreciate the beauty of the iPod and its sucessors, I just think its inexcusably underfeatured.

For you, recording is "critical." For someone else, an FM tuner is "critical." For someone else, it's... and so on.

Once you satisfy all the people who have different ideas about what's "critical," the iPod is no longer simple or elegant. It's bigger, more expensive, and more complex.

The iPod doesn't "condescendingly assume" anything. It's the best at what it does, which is what the vast majority of people want. Most tech people don't understand this kind of approach, which is why four years after its release the iPod is still uncontested. Other manufacturers keep adding "critical functionality," and the iPod chugs along, leaving them far behind.

Kim is exactly right. You may think a feature is "critical," but that feature may be superfluous for 95% of the market (and adding it might add to the cost of the product, or even decrease its reliability, since the more complex a product is, the greater the chance of something going wrong). As much as some people like to think Apple is "dumb" or "bad" for not including a recorder, or an FM tuner, or whatever, the fact of the matter is that Apple is one of the best companies around at figuring out what people really want (where in this case "people" is "the majority of people actually buying MP3 players"). If the iPod doesn't have a built-in recorder, it's because *most* people just don't care about it.

If you need a high-quality recorder, you should buy a different player and enjoy it; more power to you, and I completely respect that decision. But to call the iPod "crippled" shows a profound misunderstanding of the market. It's like the gadget-geek teenagers on Web forums calling people "lame" and "stupid" for buying an iPod instead of the latest "super-feature-everything player."

Thanks MLA.

Anytime someone criticizes the iPod while touting the (tiny niche player) Archos, I know that they don't understand the mass market.

MLA + Kim,

Thanks for the conversation.

My point isn't that the iPod is a badly designed device, that Apple (in this case) doesn't understand the mass market, or that an old Archos is better designed (though I'd love to see Apple make it easy for some hackers to play with the iPod's OS).

My point of dropping this link on Jeff Jarvis's site was that if you believe that the new web, Web 2.0, is about the conversation, about the re-configuring of the media landscape away from a simple producer-consumer model to a more participatory media, then you should see the iPod as crippled.

The iPod's equivalent would be an email client that can only read messages, a television, or a blog without a comments section.

Given how much emphasis Apple has put on making media tools available to non-professionals with the Macs, I find the lack of recording features in the iPod to be a crippling flaw.

The device certainly sells well (and bless Apple for bringing aesthetics to the computer and electonics market), but that shouldn't mean that Web 2.0 evangelists should embrace it, unless Web 2.0 simply means an expansion of the group of people who are the producers and not about a revolution that breaks down the producer/consumer model.

I'm in complete agreement that most, perhaps 95%, perhaps more, don't look for a device that can record when they buy a music player.

But what happens when you give them that power?

Might some two percent discover the recording feature and start experimenting?

Might we not see a modest flowering of oral histories or guided tours of neighborhoods and museums or hilarious field recordings?

That's what I'd love to see, but it won't happen with a generation of people with iPods in their pockets.

That's why the iPod is crippled.

I could see people calling the ipod "crippled" because it clearly already has the ability to record- the firmware supports it but there's no mic attached to the device, requiring various add ons.

There's this tidbit too:

http://ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/why-podcasters-and-bootleggers-will-love-the-new-ipod/

"The Sony Mini-Disc has been around for years and you can make some fabulous recordings with that."

And despite all your criticisms of the alternatives like the iPod, you don't use a minidisc recorder -- especially the new Hi-MD recorders with USB digital output -- because?

"if you believe that the new web, Web 2.0, is about the conversation... ...then you should see the iPod as crippled."

The iPod need not have anything to do with Web 2.0. It's a brilliant design, a little bit like taking the evolutionary view of a shark -- nearly perfect for its purpose.

The iPod is not the device for you, and that's fine. But to call it crippled is nonsense. It has produced a tectonic shift in music & culture. Few consumer devices in history can make that claim. And Apple has succeeded not despite ignoring advice like yours, but *because* of ignoring it.

Check out the M-Audio MicroTrack 24/96. Finally there's a handheld device that records high quality audio (digital or otherwise), talks USB 2.0 without insane DRM, and supports both upload and download. It'll record in MP3 if you like, but it shines at high quality recording. http://core-sound.com/microtrack_2496/1.php

Unfortunately it uses Compact Flash rather than a hard drive. In the audiophile market there's a desire to not have the noise of a hard drive. Or else they're just stupid about technology choices -- I'm not sure which. But CF is getting fast and cheap at the usual rate.

By the way, Kim, the iPod hasn't produced any tectonic shifts, in either music or culture. Were you comparing it to, say, the invention of Rock&Roll,
or perhaps the novel? It's made a bunch of money for Apple, locked up the supply of tiny hard drives and flash memories for years, and given Apple a foothold in extracting control from the record companies who were so desparate for mainstream DRM that they'd hand the reins to Apple. So OK, the iPod has done one good thing,
at least for those who trust an Apple monopoly better than they trust the RIAA/MPAA cartel.

Someday there'll be documentation on this blog about how you enter comments so that it doesn't all run into one paragraph. None of the obvious things worked. Sorry.

Why don't you install iPod Linux? Then you could record voice memos/podcasts by just talking into the left earbud. I'm not kidding, go check it out. As a plus, iPod Linux is free, and comes with extra games and fun stuff. Sorry to sound like an advertisement, but that's really the simplest solution to your problem.