5. Bye Bye Icon Of Twenty First Century Design

I got so sick of messing with my Ipod and Itunes that I threw my Nano into some forgotten corner of the house. I can't find it, really. I swear I really had one. I still have the receipt from J & R Music and the "design of the 21st century" box it came in along with those painful earbuds, the early Itunes software and the lovely documentation. After trashing the Ipod I went back to using the Creative Labs 512 MB Muvo TX FM MP3 player I bought earlier in 2005. It does everything the Nano does without all its limitations and I'll never have to mess with Ipods or Itunes again. Yea, it can't legally play the Itunes files I paid for and downloaded, but who cares, I'm no longer a prisoner of Apple's icky "I" world.

Creative Labs Muvo TX FM separates from the battery case and becomes a USB flash drive for easy transfer of MP3 files to the device.

The Muvo even has an FM radio and, miracle of miracles, a user replaceable AAA battery. Batteries that can't be replaced by we mere mortals are another nano brained idea from Apple. They result from Apple's two major lusts. The first is for money and the second is for "cool" and usually dysfunctional design. If I can't replace the battery on my Nano, who will and at what price? I leave that to your imagination, but I'm sure "Apple Corp." and "too much" will show up somewhere in that exercise. The correct term to describe Nano design isn't "cool," it's "disposable." I'm glad I already disposed of my $250 "icon of twenty first century design."