iPod, uPod, we allPod

Last night I finally broke down and bought my first iPod. The reasons were necessity, as I've got a string of 10+ hour roadtrips ahead of me and need some serious music storage in the car.

In the 12 hours that I've owned and used it, I've come to appreciate all the features people have written about in the past. I didn't know I owned that much music and figured the 10gig model was plenty (it's over 3 days of music, afterall), but I find myself scavenging any song I can to put on the device. When I hear a new song I want it on the iPod immediately, and in a matter of hours I only had a couple gigs left on it. The interface is amazing, and actually scales pretty well when you have 1700 songs on it. It's not too difficult to find a single album or set the entire collection on random (how I normally listen to music). The iTunes integration is incredible. You pull the iPod out of the package, plug it into your firewire port and it does everything automatically after that, finding the iPod and loading all your music into it.

I hope Apple has a healthy markup on this device because while I was in the Palo Alto store buying one, three people ahead of me were doing the same thing (and we all had to wait for them to pull more iPods "from the back" since the shelves were bare). While I waited in line for five minutes, I saw about $2,000 change hands as people picked up their new devices to jog with, to give away as graduation presents, and to upgrade from older models.