luminescente

On the way to work today there was a girl a few meters way from me on the subway. She had headphones on and was listening to some music, like a lot of people on the subway. I wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t for the fact that in the middle of the short commute she reached for her wallet, took out a CD player and a huge (about 8cm thick) CD case, happily started flipping through the CDs, chose one and replaced the one in the player.

It started me thinking. I wasn’t listening to music but I had my 512mb Shuffle tucked away in one of my pockets and I surely had more music in it than she had on all her stuff, in a much more convenient package. As an added feature, if I had my iPod stolen, i’d only lose the 100 euro it cost me back then. As a secondary added feature, I would have an excuse for getting a 2gb Nano :). She had some copies, but some were original CDs, and probably would cost her much more than my shuffle, music included.

Still, it’s some good food for thought that as we strive to know everyhing about the cutting edge (and given money, experience it), and then look at how far other people are from it, either by choice or by less unfortunate reasons.

Incidently, Russel talked about the Shuffle a couple of days ago, but I only took notice after writing most of this post. After reading his, just let me add that at the time I bought my Suffle, while I found it’s lack of display a huge turn down, it was the cheapest flash player I found. As much as I like the regular iPod, it was too expensive, and still is (at least for me), at the time I had gone through all the brand name and no-name flash players, and it was still common to find 128mb players for the same price as the Shuffle. Being a real iPod with 512mb for that price seemed enough to mitigate it’s lack of display.