While there certainly are downsides to the iPod, your article took a very skewed and biased approach.
1) Battery life - you mention the iPod has "6 hours". Not sure where you got this information since Apple quotes 8. I've routinely gotten 10 hours (full drive from Memphis to Chicago, including some rush hour traffic). Meanwhile, Dell quotes 15 hours and you helpfully add "lasted almost 20 hours in our battery test". Okay, you want to run your own tests, fine, but do it for the iPod as well. I don't dispute that the Dell has a much longer battery life, but your reporting is extremely biased here.
2) Jogging - First off, you give the impression that the iPod drive is running much more than it is (" hard drives spin thousands of times per minute") - it's on for a couple of seconds. You yourself say that experts agree the iPod hard drive will not suffer problems from sudden shocks. Yet even with that, the gauntlet comes down from your "expert" opinion - "Some experts say that it's impossible to damage the drive in this way, but I'm not buying that". Some experts say journalists are supposed to have some objectivity and quest for truth, but I'm not buying that.
3) The iPod is expensive. Agreed.
4) You want decent recording. Yup, the iPod won't do that.
5) Choice - So, you get the iPod and can use the most popuar music store with the most liberal DRM and largest catalog. Or you get some other playerand either get locked into its service (ala Dell) or maybe not be able to play purchased stuff at all - many players have major issues with DRM WMA.
However, what strikes me most is you make several points and back them up with an example. However, the examples given fail the other points. The Dell has great batter life, but is expensive and will suffer the same claimed jogging problems. The CD MP3 player is cheap but is all moving parts and is far, far too big for jogging (and certainly no recording). Flash players can't generally record and while they might have great battery life, that means you can play your 20 songs over and over and over. Which leads me to my final point...
You neglect the key benefit of a hard drive based player - for many people, this means they can take their ENTIRE music collection with them. If they're jogging, it's there. In the car, it's there. No remembering CD's and switching them in and out. No getting locked into burned playlists on MP3 CD's. No limitations on the tiny, tiny limitations of flash based players.
Or, you can create/share/organize/burn through iPhoto, widely regarded to have one of the best user interfaces of any photo management program. Similarly, with iTunes you can play/burn/rip/organize/buy/iPod all your music from another great interface. You can browse anything on a Mac, be it a camera compact flash card, to network shares, to iPods all from the Finder. And thee are far more groupware applications, generally of higher quality, on the Mac than on Linux.
Finally, if you really do want to subject "The Rest of Them" to pain (I consider even "apt-get" pain fr a normal user), they can always install evolution and most of the open source packages via fink and the built-in X11 environment.
Linux runs on other hardware - great. Now what was the rest of your point?
This won't get modded up, but I would disagree when it comes to OS X. With OS X, easy stuff is easy (via Aqua). Intermediate stuff can actually be hard, as you make the transition from Aqua to the UNIX layers. Integrating the two can be mildly tricky. However, once over that hump, I'd say that very integration makes impossible stuff possible (think integration of the command line and all it offers with GUI desktop programs and AppleScript).
I'm too new to get modded.:)
While 128MB fash is out, the ability to create custom "live CD's" has been part of the Mac for nearly a decade. Ever since the late 680x0 days we've been able to boot from CD, and OS X is no different (although it is more difficult to create boot CD's). DiskWarrior, Norton, and many other tools have their own custom "live CD's".
Now, if you mean booting into the Finder, that's also been done via BootCD. Again, not as easy as classic Mac OS was (which was painfully simple - drag one folder to a CD and poof - it works), but not terrible either.
As far as CompactFlash and the like, the only thing stopping it is the size of a standard OS X install, which is significantly larger than the smallest Linux install. However, Apple has consistently provided the capability to boot off of anything you can connect to the system. Currently hard drives, CD, firewire drives, usb drives, flash drives, NetBoot, etc.
Etc. The 12" Powerbook was always a rev'ed iBook. Now that the iBook has inherited many of these bonuses, the 12" is less appealing. I configured identical ones (as much as possible). For a $650 difference, all I got was 200Mhz, DVD burner (nice, but still...), and DVI out.
Setting an Open Firmware password (as mentioned above) prevents both changing the boot disk and single user mode. As also pointed out above, only physically changing the RAM or the hard drive will get around the Open Firmware password.
If someone breaks in while you're not there, you're screwed. If your machine is in a relatively public environment where people would notice someone disassembling a machine (computer lab, at home with you present), it's secure.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to mirror, please mirror the FULL SIZE images as well. wget --recursive --no-parent ...
Sent this missive off to CNET:
While there certainly are downsides to the iPod, your article took a very skewed and biased approach.
1) Battery life - you mention the iPod has "6 hours". Not sure where you got this information since Apple quotes 8. I've routinely gotten 10 hours (full drive from Memphis to Chicago, including some rush hour traffic). Meanwhile, Dell quotes 15 hours and you helpfully add "lasted almost 20 hours in our battery test". Okay, you want to run your own tests, fine, but do it for the iPod as well. I don't dispute that the Dell has a much longer battery life, but your reporting is extremely biased here.
2) Jogging - First off, you give the impression that the iPod drive is running much more than it is (" hard drives spin thousands of times per minute") - it's on for a couple of seconds. You yourself say that experts agree the iPod hard drive will not suffer problems from sudden shocks. Yet even with that, the gauntlet comes down from your "expert" opinion - "Some experts say that it's impossible to damage the drive in this way, but I'm not buying that". Some experts say journalists are supposed to have some objectivity and quest for truth, but I'm not buying that.
3) The iPod is expensive. Agreed.
4) You want decent recording. Yup, the iPod won't do that.
5) Choice - So, you get the iPod and can use the most popuar music store with the most liberal DRM and largest catalog. Or you get some other playerand either get locked into its service (ala Dell) or maybe not be able to play purchased stuff at all - many players have major issues with DRM WMA.
However, what strikes me most is you make several points and back them up with an example. However, the examples given fail the other points. The Dell has great batter life, but is expensive and will suffer the same claimed jogging problems. The CD MP3 player is cheap but is all moving parts and is far, far too big for jogging (and certainly no recording). Flash players can't generally record and while they might have great battery life, that means you can play your 20 songs over and over and over. Which leads me to my final point...
You neglect the key benefit of a hard drive based player - for many people, this means they can take their ENTIRE music collection with them. If they're jogging, it's there. In the car, it's there. No remembering CD's and switching them in and out. No getting locked into burned playlists on MP3 CD's. No limitations on the tiny, tiny limitations of flash based players.
>So why do we allow billboards, huge store signs, and ads on cars, busses, and park benches to pollute our visual environment? Money.
But for many of these artists, creating a full album of quality songs is far more than 10x the effort.
You may want to try Fink: http://fink.sourceforge.net/. Install away to your heart's content.
Or, you can create/share/organize/burn through iPhoto, widely regarded to have one of the best user interfaces of any photo management program. Similarly, with iTunes you can play/burn/rip/organize/buy/iPod all your music from another great interface. You can browse anything on a Mac, be it a camera compact flash card, to network shares, to iPods all from the Finder. And thee are far more groupware applications, generally of higher quality, on the Mac than on Linux. Finally, if you really do want to subject "The Rest of Them" to pain (I consider even "apt-get" pain fr a normal user), they can always install evolution and most of the open source packages via fink and the built-in X11 environment. Linux runs on other hardware - great. Now what was the rest of your point?
This won't get modded up, but I would disagree when it comes to OS X. With OS X, easy stuff is easy (via Aqua). Intermediate stuff can actually be hard, as you make the transition from Aqua to the UNIX layers. Integrating the two can be mildly tricky. However, once over that hump, I'd say that very integration makes impossible stuff possible (think integration of the command line and all it offers with GUI desktop programs and AppleScript). I'm too new to get modded. :)
While 128MB fash is out, the ability to create custom "live CD's" has been part of the Mac for nearly a decade. Ever since the late 680x0 days we've been able to boot from CD, and OS X is no different (although it is more difficult to create boot CD's). DiskWarrior, Norton, and many other tools have their own custom "live CD's". Now, if you mean booting into the Finder, that's also been done via BootCD. Again, not as easy as classic Mac OS was (which was painfully simple - drag one folder to a CD and poof - it works), but not terrible either. As far as CompactFlash and the like, the only thing stopping it is the size of a standard OS X install, which is significantly larger than the smallest Linux install. However, Apple has consistently provided the capability to boot off of anything you can connect to the system. Currently hard drives, CD, firewire drives, usb drives, flash drives, NetBoot, etc.
Mod parent UP
Where did you get this information? None of Apple's pages that I can find specify what specific "G4" is in the iBook.
There are a lot of architectural differences between the 15/17 inch Powerbooks and the 12:
1) Bus speed
2) Firewire speed
3) Gigabit ethernet
4) Backlit keyboard
Etc. The 12" Powerbook was always a rev'ed iBook. Now that the iBook has inherited many of these bonuses, the 12" is less appealing. I configured identical ones (as much as possible). For a $650 difference, all I got was 200Mhz, DVD burner (nice, but still...), and DVI out.
What would you use it for? You're not really going to copy over your MP3's at a miniscule 20Mbps, when Firewire is 20x faster?
Setting an Open Firmware password (as mentioned above) prevents both changing the boot disk and single user mode. As also pointed out above, only physically changing the RAM or the hard drive will get around the Open Firmware password. If someone breaks in while you're not there, you're screwed. If your machine is in a relatively public environment where people would notice someone disassembling a machine (computer lab, at home with you present), it's secure.