Sketchy crew

It has been quite a while since I jumped on the Apple bandwagon. I mean, I certainly don’t have two feet on it because I still love my PC’s, but still. I bought my original 40 gig iPod with the monochrome screen. Then I bought the 60 gig iPod photo. Then I bought my first Nano, which was 4 gigs. That led to an 8 gig Nano as I fell in love with the Nike+ running rig. Mixed into the iPod craze, I bought a MacBook Pro and a copy of Apple LogicPro so that I could do music production at home. Finally, yesterday after my hold button broke on my 8 gig Nano, it was time to buy a new one.

I am a bigtime power user of my Nano. It isn’t Apple’s fault that the hold button broke on my 8 gig one. I use that thing every day for hours and hours on end. In all, over the last year, I have listened to every minute of two national radio shows whose running times combined regularly hit 7 hours per day. Combine that with all the Smodcasts (Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier,) audio books, songs and other pieces of audio that I listen to, I certainly get my money’s worth out of the device.

So, now I needed to replace my Nano with a new one so it could keep track of my renewed interest in jogging with the Nike + system. I spent $200 for a 16 gig of the latest variety of Nano and I started using it. For me, this means plugging it into my PC. It means plugging it in in my bedroom to my Altec Lansing peripherals. It means plugging it in in the car with my iPlay and headphone jack into the car stereo. That is how I listen to it and keep it charged throughout the day.

Well, the latest version of the Nano works just find syncing with the PC, but none of my other charging options work. The Altec Lansing speaker system which has worked on every iPod I have ever owned tells me that charging is unsupported on this iPod. Then this morning it told me the same thing in the car. Great.

A little bit of research reveals that Apple decided to cut some corners. Apparently when apple moved away from the Firewire charging process to the USB one, they begged all the peripheral makers to do it too. This is a change from 12v to 5v in the adapter. So, finally, in this latest generation, Apple has decided to save a few cents per iPod and do away with the converter that would allow me (and countless others) to use the peripherals that I have surrounded myself with over the course of not 1, not 2, but 5 different iPods. All those dollars that I spent are now completely worthless because they no longer serve a purpose in the way I have it set up in my life.

And maybe it isn’t a big deal to me to have to go out and buy a new charging cable for my car and a new speaker system for my bedroom, but that should be for me to decide, not Apple. Backwards compatibility is important when you are trying to make people adopt you into their culture, or even adopt new culture. Since I spent all the time and money doing it, Apple shouldn’t punish me after they have me all committed. Certainly they shouldn’t do it over what some people describe as a few cents.