Monday, 08/04/08

I bought the 16GB iPod touch the weekend it came out, by parking myself with the laptop in the U-Village Apple store's theater section, and to illustrate what a bad blogger I am, this was long enough ago that the store has since been remodeled and the theater section razed.

I could see the service door from the theater, and figured I would notice the day's shipment hitting the floor (iPods were selling out instantly, but weren't in such high demand that people were queueing). To prevent my self-esteem from falling too far, I limited myself to the charge of a single battery. And it worked! I brought that sucker home feeling like I'd scored a pint-size version of the 2001 monolith.

This was setting expectations too high, and for weeks I felt ambivalent about the thing, because a) it quickly proved to be a mediocre iPod, and b) the software development story was far from clear.

It was a bad iPod in that it required visual interaction to make frequent changes like volume adjustments or track-skipping, both things I could do by touch while the previous model was still in my pocket, and likewise issues that the iPhone had managed to avoid. It's also surprisingly bad at precise scrubbing, as I discovered all over again when my mom tried to use it on a car trip. Also, I was ambivalent because the Touch had 20% of the capacity of the iPod I'd bought the year earlier, while costing more.

I thought I'd explore jailbroken software development but underestimated my distaste for undocumented frameworks. (I couldn't even muster interest in Core Animation until Leopard shipped.) Eventually Apple announced the official SDK and even later than that they delivered it, and despite the bizarre developer NDA policy and still-missing pieces and Apple's strings attached to software distribution, it is bloody terrific. Writing software for the iPhone/iPod is the ground floor of something that will eventually be bigger than the Mac. I have no idea what the ceiling is going to be for the platform.

All that came later. I was still leaning toward returning the iPod in its first two weeks because of the lack of hardware volume control. I changed my mind watching Robert Altman's "The Long Goodbye" in bed, when Marlowe opens an envelope in the elevator and finds this:

My first thought upon seeing such a ludicrous denomination was, of course, the Mr. Plow episode of the Simpsons, where Homer cons Barney into driving out to Widow's Peak:

Homer: There's a $10,000 bill in it for you.
Barney: Oh yeah? Which president's on it?
Homer: Uh, all of 'em! They're having a party. Jimmy Carter's passed out on the couch.

My second thought was that someone in the movie thought Philip Marlowe was as gullible as Barney Gumble, but that didn't make any kind of contextual sense. So I paused the movie and googled for "five thousand dollar bill", which swiftly led me to Wikipedia's page for large denomination bills in US currency, which told me that Nixon had withdrawn the $5K bill in 1969, only four years before the movie came out, but that they were still legal tender, which made a certain oddball sense for a movie that has already yanked its protagonist forward in time by four decades.

I also learned that the true face of the $10,000 bill was Salmon P. Chase, civil war-era Governor of and Senator from Ohio, as well as the sixth chief justice of the US Supreme Court. But the most important thing that I learned was that the iPod touch's true value was that it was the first desirable device short of a laptop that allows one to both watch and fact-check a movie without getting out of bed. OK with me. 07:58AM «

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