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Thursday 4 December 2008

IPods for idiots

It is three years since I last wrote about my iPod.

It is three years since I last wrote about my iPod. When I first bought the blighter, my then 12-year-old son warned me that it would prove a disaster and he was absolutely right.

Unable to cope with the technology required to load the thing I enlisted the help of my nephew, Tom, who agreed to transfer my favourite CDs for 50 pence a time. By the end I had some 2,000 tracks on a machine the size of a cigarette packet. I was a little frustrated because it was capable of holding 10,000 tunes, and poor Tom’s computer had given up the ghost, but how I enjoyed putting on those smart white earphones on my rail journeys to London and choosing whether to listen to the Stones, the Grateful Dead or classic soul.

Days after writing my column, however, the bloody iPod got jammed. You could still listen to it, still turn it on and off, but it was stuck in shuffle mode. In other words, the machine did the choosing, and had a spooky knack of invariably selecting a track you didn’t want to hear. At first you could hit a button and move on to the next selection, but then that facility broke down, too. You were lumbered with whatever the machine wanted to give you. Then it became impossible to turn the thing off. And then the bastard ran out of juice.

I was so fed up I gave the wretched thing to my son, who had so cheerfully predicted fiasco. He managed to recharge it, but not to get it out of shuffle mode, and took it on a school camping holiday. By the time he came back, he’d learnt how to turn the iPod off. The snag was that it now wouldn’t turn on.

Eventually Ed passed the thing on to his friend Oliver who reported that he could sometimes get it to work by pressing the wrong buttons rather than the right ones. And then the thing died on even this savvy technician, and that was that. With the original cost of the machine and the money I’d paid to Tom I was down by about £400 and a great deal of heartache. I concluded iPods were great when they worked and sheer hell when they didn’t.

More articles from: Charles Spencer | this section

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