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Meanwhile there is a fringe group of people, mostly geeks, sitting in their batcaves grumbling about the superiority of whatever it is that they use. Yawn.

Insulting and dismissive in the same sentence.

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And it was certainly cooler than the clunky devices Creative and Rio had out at the time, plus the HDD storage far outstripped the 256MB flash players that were standard at the time. Luck? Nope.

One man's clunky is another man's streamlined. Is flat "cool"? According to Apple, Motorola (Moto Razr phones) and vinyl LPs it is, I'd personally rather carry a cassette than an LP, but that's just me.

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As far as "it's design makes it crap." Well, nope. Nano screen scratches a design flaw? Only partly. They had a bad run of screens and the Nano design called for a thinner layer of coating than previous 'pods. Didn't work out. Oh well.

Nope, and oh well? People bought these products for hundreds of dollars, they were severely damaged within days and Apple refused to admit a problem, and you're confident in your opinion that this wasn't an issue.

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Read the ARS Technica article where they dropped, kicked, ran over, hit with a hammer, and basically tortured a Nano and it wouldn't stop playing music? There's a design flaw I like: Will not stop working even if run over by a car.

Now that sounded a wee bit fishy to me... you're talking about this, correct? The article where dropping a Nano out of a car window did not appreciable damage the unit, save for scratches. Honestly, it doesn't weigh much, so the physics of it are it's got a pretty good drag coefficient, coupled with not much mass behind it that means it's not hitting the ground hard. I don't believe this is the kind of force that would be most likely to damage the iPod. Kind of like saying a feather is indestructable because you can drop it out of a plane and it'll survive unscathed.

Dropping it from a park bench destroyed the screen. They (and you) consider this a pass, I'd consider it a fail. The music still plays - but the functionality is gone. I've dropped a "G-shock" watch ($0.50 plastic watch I grabbed out of stock when I worked shipping and receiving) off an 8th story balcony, and it's continued to work, with only a chip in the LCD screen, so I'd already consider the screen becoming non-functional as a fail. There are no mentions of hitting it with a hammer or kicking it. Running it over with a car is kind of smoke and mirrors... as long as there are standoffs between the front and back of the case, a car's weight would be evenly distributed over these and shouldn't damage the internals. I've had my foot run over by a 1/2 ton truck and if the tiny bones in my foot weren't snapped like twigs (my calcium consumption is probably 3% of RDA), I wouldn't expect electronics to suffer much either.

As for all the OS talk - I'm not suggesting any OS doesn't stink. But I'm also not willing to put any on a pedestal. I haven't gone on on how XP roolz - all else droolz, or how they'll get my OS/2 Warp when they pry it from my cold dead hands or anything. Computers are a tool for me. I want my tool to work. I don't need it to be tangerine, or glowing, or stylin' I just want it to work.

My personal experience has been some frustration with Windows 3.x (mostly networking issues until 3.11WFWG), a good deal of frustration with 95, none to speak of with Win98/SE or NT3.5/4.0, I skipped over 2000 and ME (which both stunk on ice) and I've been remarkably impressed with WinXP (though that impression requires that you patch the OS security defects on an hourly basis, but since none of them have actually burned me, it's been a non-issue for me)... in the Mac camp, I've never myself been the primary user of a Mac system - they've been and are in my workplace, and from a purely managerial standpoint, OS9.x has created very few headaches and slipped timelines on my projects, OSX came out of the box like a screaming baby. If someone's still shiny-faced about this wonderful tech, maybe it's still got some cool factor for them... I've become pretty grizzled with the personal computer since 1983, I just want it to work, if it doesn't, I either lose money or face.

Bren R.