HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES?

     I am very much a tech junkie. And like all of them, I have passed through the Apple phase. The Apple Phase is that phase that one believes that anything Apple Inc creates is the best thing that has ever happened to us since the previous thing Apple created. I am talking iPhones iPods, iPads, iMac and any iShit in general. I used to see them as pioneers of every new technology they said they came up with. But I am over that now. I am a bit too rational now. I do research before I make my decisions on these things. I do not base my opinion on just an iAdvert. My conclusion is this. iThings are way overrated.

     Take the iPhone. Yes the touch screen is great and all but what good is a phone that has no network. The iPhone4 has a network issue that had it losing its network when held by right handed people. Something about installing its antennae at a stupid place. They issued a software to fix this. A software! How would that move the antennae to the right place? That is like Toyota releasing a pdf file for the cars that could not stop, instead of recalling them. Only technologically retarded people will believe it will work. And then there is the issue of them chucking an iPhone every 3 months. What is up with that? First the iPhone 3. Then the iPhone 3.5 then the iPhone 3GS…what the hell? And they are not that different from each other either. They just go on reducing the thickness by micrometers and convince you the the lack of those micrograms will convince you that you have lost weight. Or they go adding one useless feature after another. First a 2 mega pixel camera, then a 2.3 megapixel camera and then a 2.75 megapixel camera…. I mean seriously? Call me when you are sure you have made a good camera.

     Then there is the iPad. Up until now I still do not know why I need to leak out my 50000 KenSh to buy such a useless gadget . It is the size of Natasha’s screen. Has no DVD drive, cannot hold a sim card and the only site it goes to is Apple.com. So basically it is just expensive glass. But if I was rich, I guess I would see the use of it. Social status improval and ease of entertainment, I think. And I am talking real rich, not like these niggas that ball on a budget . Nigga how you gon buy a Sony Ericsson C905 then have no money to put credit in it. All you do is send Please Call Mes and flash people. Stop balling on a budget and be real. Do not buy an iPad if you do not own at least a high-end laptop and a Smartphone. It beats logic.

     But all what I have said above maybe prejudiced. Biased from the reviews I hear people give the said gadgets. I have never owned any of the two. That is why you may feel free to ignore my cynicism and get whatever iPhone or iPad you want and not let my ramblings influence your decision. But one thing I am sure about is the iPods. The bigger the badder. Tried and tested. This I will give you the truth.

     The only iPod worth spending your money on is the Nano. Avoid the Classic, Shuffle or Touch. The reasoning is simple. The Touch is just stupid expensive. Just get a bloody iPhone (yes. that red one). Its exactly the same as the iPod Touch only that the iPhone can make a call. The Shuffle avoid because I do not get why you would want put a thousand songs on it and not want to see which one you are playing. The songs play randomly and its difficult to choose the one you want. That is not my definition of living spontaneously. The Classic….well, the Classic just beats them all in order of uselessnessity. If you do not want to ever buy another iPod in a year or two, do not buy the iPod Classic. Why? You may ask. Well, the reason why you should not buy it is because of the reason why you want to buy it. Flow with me here. Anyone who wants the Classic, wants it because of its size. It is so big, data-ically speaking that is. the 80 gig, the 120 gig or the 160 gig. That is enough space to put all your illegally downloaded music, torrented movies and the porn gotten from Kippe.

     So how is big size a bad thing?  Well, think of the Classic as a black dude and its 160 gig as his dick…..

     Okay I forgot where I was going with that analogy so just forget it. What I am trying to say is the huge hard disk is what is making the Classic my worst kind of iPod. It has too many moving parts and that is just the problem. Compared to all other kinds of iPods, it uses a hard disk instead use a flash memory, like a USB drive. Or like we Kenyans call it, a flash disk. The  flash memory kind has less moving parts in which case it is lighter, faster, uses less power and generally does not skip a beat (or 12) when you shake it. I did not get this from some manual or forum but from actual practical experience.

      The worst thing about the Classic is its hard disk’s short life span. After a while, the hard disk suddenly becomes corrupt and cannot synchronize music. I say suddenly because the Apple people do not have an explanation of why that happens. I tried Googling a solution but what I found were just other frustrated earthlings complaining about the same thing. They do not know why their iPod stop synching. The iStaff of course tries to evade the problem by giving irrelevant answers, my favourite being, “it is not synchronizing because you are trying to add music that was downloaded illegally. Please visit Apple.com to buy music….” That is pure bullshit. Fresh, out-of-the-cow bull shit. It is ot syncing because the hard disk is fried. Useless. Unusable. Wasted. Like the first shot.

     So here I was. Starring at a 120 gig iPod that had just crashed for no specific reason. Wondering what to do. Luckily, it was not mine. A friend had helped me with it during some batter trade we had transacted. I give him my lighter mp3 player inexchange for his bulky one. Unluckily, it got spoiled when It was in my possession so basically I cannot get mine back until I fix it. Which is impossible. Upgrading the software did not work, Restoring it did not either. Google was even worse at helping. So I went to my tech genius who also had such a problem with a 80 gig iPod once. I asked him what I should do. He told me to use the iPod as a door stop. That is what it was only good for now.

     Another solution was to restore it and avoid putting more than 2 gb of music or data on it. Anything more that and the freaking gadget goes ap(pl)e-shit on your machine. What the fuck. Out of 120 GB I can only use 2? What the hell!!! Now it was like I was holding a heavy Nano. 2 gb is not enough music. And everytime I need to change music I have to restore the iPod and start the synching process again. With the bad internet in this country the process takes the better part of the day. By when I will have already listened to the music I wanted to add through the computer. Thrice. And if there is no internet, I am stuck with an ipod with the same songs for ever. 

this is a replica of the 160 gb dead weight.

     All this shenanigans has got me temporarily quitting music. I have not listened to my music for the better part of this semester. Normally I would go crazy without my music but somehow I have managed. Maybe its because of the heavy school workload . Maybe its because of the realization that music these days is very sucky. Maybe its because I have not been around people who make me want to go crazy (my aunt. *cough cough*). All I know is, I am not listening to music and I am okay. Weird.

       Anyway, I am still trying to fix this thing or work around its limitations. Like I have finally learned how to restore an iPod without an internet connection. Just click shift+restore. It will open the file directory where you choose to restore it with an .ipsw file that you had downloaded earlier. Pretty nice trick this. Overcomes the challenge for limited  internet. All I am struggling to work around is how to use most of the bytes for music. If you have any idea how to fix this, holla at your boy… at to me. Preferably at me. You can also let me know your take on iGadgets. How do you like them Apples?