Friday, September 26, 2003

Dell and the iPod Generations

(originally posted at bigbadgeek.com)

stevenf has a great rant about Dell's iPod-clone (DellPod?) and online music store. I was quite taken aback to see the similarities between the iPod and the Dell Digital Jukebox. Shameless.

While Scotty awaits the delivery of his new 3rd-gen iPod, we briefly discussed the pros and cons of the connector design. The 2nd-gen iPod that I've used for almost a year now has a standard firewire port. This allows me to lose firewire cables at my leisure and replace them with a cheapy from the local Radio Shack. It also avails me the option of toting multiple firewire devices and only stowing a single cable.

The 3rd-gen iPod uses an icky Apple-proprietary connector between the iPod and the dock. This ickyness can almost be overlooked by the practical application is provides. The dock can then connect via USB or firewire. So, no more Windows- or Apple-only devices. This undoubtedly makes business-sense for Apple, but... icky.

Still, with my 20gb iPod maxed out, the 3rd-gen devices are mighty attractive for their disk space.

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