What is this Apple Ipod?

They are miracles!

It is like a phonograph that can hold thousands of cylinders in something that can fit in your besom pocket.

Over priced, over marketed, hyped up music player that is purchased by “victims” who are suckered into the celebrity supported advertisements. It doesn’t play WMA, it doesn’t behave like a simple mass storage device as do most other “normal” MP3 players. You pretty much are stuck using the worst music software in the world, iTunes. It is a major hassle to copy music from different PCs to it – whereas any other MP3 player simply plugs and plays into any PC and you can copy music back or forth – no syncing hassles.

Overrated garbage.

@Charles Way to be a hipster, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never even seen an advertisement for iPods, let alone a celebrity endorsement. Maybe they exist, but the iPod has been popular for a long time now. They became popular because of innovation and word of mouth. They weren’t the first MP3 players, but they were much better than the original MPMan and Rio (which most people don’t even know ever existed). Also, a Zune is more expensive than an iPod, so it’s hard to call the iPod overpriced. The first iPods were pretty expensive, but new technology is always expensive. It’s the price of innovation. That’s how capitalism works (but maybe you’re a Commie).

As for WMA, it’s an inferior format. Who cares that iPods can’t play it (especially since iTunes has a built-in converter)? Listening tests routinely show that consumers prefer MP3 to WMA except for one Microsoft-sponsored event that has never been duplicated. That’s straight up science disproving your point. WMA is only better at low bit rates (which nobody uses). So basically, if you have a shitty WMA file and a shitty MP3 file, the WMA file will be slightly less shitty than the MP3 file. But if you have a high quality WMA and a high quality MP3, the MP3 will be far superior. That’s not really great news for WMA.

I get that you don’t like iTunes. That’s fine. People’s tastes differ. But it’s not really an objective criticism. The only real complaint is that Apple takes DRM (digital rights management) way to seriously. They make it very difficult to use the iPod itself as a means for trading music, but really only inconvenience their customers because it’s easy to get music for free in lots of other ways. I agree that the syncing stuff is weird, but that alone doesn’t warrant calling the iPod “overrated garbage.” It’s one flaw in an otherwise solid product.

I haven’t got a clue.

You get what you pay for I think. You can hate Apple but you really should be more impartial in your review of the product.