About an hour ago a woman in running shoes, spandex shorts, a sports bra, and an armband for holding an MP3 player ran past my apartment. Naturally, I leaned towards the window for a closer look.
Right away I saw that she had one of the third-generation iPod Nanos, colloquially known as the “fatty iPod“ for its squat shape. This was not in the least bit surprising. If you see a jogger with earbuds, odds are, they’re listening to an iPod nano or an iPod shuffle. (I’ve seen, to my recollection, exactly three Zunes in the wild so far. Poor Microsoft.) I don’t run with an iPod, but I use a Sansa Clip, which was cheaper than an iPod shuffle, and actually had a screen and working buttons!
You used to see people running with the bigger hard-drive based iPods, but I personally always thought running with a hard-drive based device was stupid. I mean, one solid kinetic whack to a hard-drive based device, and that’s the end of the hard drive. Flash-based memory is much sturdier.
Of course, you can cram more onto a hard-drive based MP3 player, but that’s less and less of a problem. Apple just released the first 64-gigabyte flash-based MP3 player of any kind, an iPod Touch crammed with 64 gigs of flash memory. The very first hard-drive based iPod had only five gigs of storage. The very first MP3 player I ever used, a Rio 600, came with exactly 32 megabytes of flash memory. That’s maybe enough for half a CD. And that was only nine years ago! Now many netbooks come with flash-based drives, and more and more laptops. I envision a glorious future when all mobile devices, laptops and MP3 players alike, no longer come with conventional magnetic hard drives but with gigabytes of cheap flash memory.
Musing upon the rapidly evolving state of technology, I turned away from the window and went to do the dishes.
Later it occurred to me that a woman in spandex shorts and a sports bra had run past the window, and I had immediately fixated on her MP3 player.
It’s just possible that there’s something wrong with me.
-JM
Posted by JM 
