Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
You could say I've been starved of portable music for a long time. The last mobile music player I got was a cassette walkman somewhere in the mid-15th century and kept using so long that I even had some songs on tapes recorded from mp3. By that time it was so worn out recording and listening became more of a hassle, a fight against glitches to get decent sound, than a pleasure, so a replacement some day was clearly needed. I wasn't in any rush to find one though, it's been a few years without regular music on the move now, hence the above starvation. So why an iPod all of a sudden? Some would probably say building Apple mania is the whole reason, but I like to make excuses like the huge storage space (and yes, it works with USB 1 - if it has to) and the slickness of the whole design. Memory based player versus some flavour of CD suddenly became much more difficult to motivate when I realized the enormous battery life in modern CD players, but I still feel I want the compactness and, to some smaller exent, the enormous skip protection you get from playing music from memory instead of a spinning CD. When I came to Hong Kong where the 15 Gb version is priced about 1000 crowns cheaper than it is at home I had pretty much made up my mind to get one already.
Of course, I have no problem to be slow and pondering even after I've taken the basic decision. I spent a few shopping days just walking aroind checking prices. With one odd exception that we couldn't seem to find again the price seemed totally standardized to what Apple charges in the online store. A (dis)advantage of reseller control I guess, which of course made picking a place to buy easier. No need to go anywhere but the nearest or nicest place on the purchase day.
Or so I thought.
The iPod is a pretty popular little thing, to say the least. Sorry, we're sold out, we hope to get some more on Monday was the answer I got from all stores I asked in the day I thought I was going to get one.
So, I waited until Monday. And once Monday came I called the stores to ask if they had any instead of rushing around to all of them. Things seemed a bit better now, the second place I tried expected to get some around 16:00 and took my name and number to reserve one and call me back when they arrived. Great, nice service. So far so good. I spent the time without any problems, and at 16:30 or so I called the store back to see if there were any news. Sorry sir, we still haven't got any, but we're happy to take your name and number again and promise to call you as soon as they arrive. Right, now it started to feel like it would be a good idea to call some more places, just in case. The process of doing so made my hope for a pod that day diminish quite quickly and forcefully. I called three or four different places, and the closest to positive I got was one that had one 15 Gb iPod left that was reserved to someone else. Also, he informed me he hoped to get more on Friday or Sunday. Since I was leaving on Saturday the thought that nobody would get more iPods until Sunday made me feel a little frustrated.
So, when I called the next store and got a positive answer, I almost didn't dare to believe it. There was a lot of background noise when I called, and the English wasn't the clearest, so Bonnie called and asked in Cantonese once just to be on the safe side. Their iPods still seemed to exist, so we rushed over there (we had some more deadlines, so it wasn't just iPod hunger that motivated the rushing (okay, in my case it was mostly iPod hunger - or fear of iPod vapour. Anyway ...)). Lo and behold, solid, existing 15 Gb iPods just sitting around and waiting to be sold to me! They even had plenty in store. Needless to say it was one of those quick purchases, so it wasn't until the way home that I checked the reciept carefully and realized the store had actually charged less than the list price as well. I don't know why, or why they didn't say so when we checked prices, but I sure didn't mind. I wasn't all that surprised anymore when most stores we walked by on our way out seemed to have a 15 Gb iPod on display ...