iTunes / iPod: Great! But …

I love my iPod Nano.

I used other MP3 players for years, shunning the iPod, because of Apple’s DRM. I realize this is imposed by the content providers, not necessarily Apple, but it has the convenient side-effect of tying consumers to Apple as well. (What?! Your competitors’ players don’t support your DRM scheme? How convenient.)

It totally pisses me off that a media mogul can force me to repurchase the same content in order to play on a different device. (This, the difference between “purchase” and “license”, sidesteps all your legal rights developed over hundreds of years; but that’s the topic for another rant.)

I hope Apple realizes that it was easy for me to move to the iPod only because I religiously restricted myself to MP3 files prior to this. (I.e. by avoiding any vendors like them.)

But now I’m basically chained to Apple. Why did I knowingly do this after years of disparaging iPod owners because of this?

A billion lemmings can’t be wrong.

Or, more specifically, the iPod interface is so frickin good that I’ll never want to change. And so I’ll never notice that someone else’s player doesn’t support Apple’s format or DRM scheme.

(The new iPhone UI further cements this; it is so natural and cool, including a nice browser interface that doesn’t require websites to author specifically for cell phone browsers. However, the new iPod touch, which uses this UI but lacks the touch wheel, can’t easily pause/play/skip/volume-adjust by feel when the iPod is in your pocket; seems Apple missed the mark on this.)

But all these negative feelings of mine are in the past. I want to make that clear. Because I’m about to blog all the things I hate about how iTunes manages the iPod.