As I alluded to in a recent post, last week I purchased my first official iPod — a brand new iPod Touch (iTouch?). Shortly after forking over the four hundred dollars (with tax) for the device it dawned on me — this is officially the first Apple product I’ve ever purchased. <\/p>\n

Back in the early 80s when Apple was just breaking into the home computer market, we owned a Franklin Ace 1000 (an Apple IIe compatible machine). Later, briefly, we owned a Laser 128, and Apple IIc clone. In college I wrote, edited and laid out newspapers and yearbooks on Macintosh Pluses<\/a>. I even have an old Macintosh LC III<\/a> sitting out in my garage that someone gave me … but I never gave the company a dime. I’ve had several mp3 players, but never an actual iPod brand.<\/p>\n

For years I avoided iPods because I don’t like iTunes, and I’m not alone in that opinion. iTunes may be a wonderful experience on the Mac, but on Windows it’s a bumbling, bloated resource hog. I hate being tied to a specific machine for updating my mp3 player, and I hate being tied to a specific program on that specific machine for that same thing. Every other mp3 player I’ve ever owned simply appears as a drive letter in Windows, which makes transferring media files a breeze. To give you an idea of how popular iTunes is on Windows, Google returns 3+ million hits for “iTunes alternative”. <\/p>\n

I already tracked down and installed CopyTrans Manager, an extremely light iTunes alternative. For some reason it’s not transferring over album cover art along with my music, but the fact that I can launch the program and move an album over in about 10 seconds versus two minutes with iTunes … yeah, I’m sticking with it. <\/p>\n

Oh, and yeah; I already jailbroke my iPod, using Quick Freedom. Took about an hour or two to figure everything out and replace the firmware. I’m guessing I could do another one in about 10 minutes now, now that I understand the process. I’m not even sure why I jailbroke mine, other than it seemed like something I would do. <\/p>\n

I have to say, the iPod Touch (which is basically an iPhone without the phone) is pretty slick. It works, and I like it. I love the interface and I can see why people would call it an “iPhone on training wheels.” It’s super easy to use and I can see transitioning to an iPhone when my current phone’s contract expires.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As I alluded to in a recent post, last week I purchased my first official iPod — a brand new iPod Touch (iTouch?). Shortly after forking over the four hundred dollars (with tax) for the device it dawned on me — this is officially the first Apple product I’ve ever purchased. Back in the early 80s when Apple was just breaking into the home computer market, we owned a Franklin Ace 1000 (an Apple IIe compatible machine). Later, briefly, we owned a Laser 128, and Apple IIc clone. In college I wrote, edited and laid out newspapers and yearbooks on… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}