Charlie White writes about what he hates about the iPod which is, I guess, praising with faint damnation. First off, the proper colloquial term is “hatorade” or maybe “hatoration” if you want to get pendatic. Get it right.

But, seriously, no one wants FM. FM radio sucks. FM radio is, if you think about it, probably a big part of the reason why iPods got so popular in the first place, because FM radio sucks so bad. I can’t stand that shit. After listening to about 30 minutes worth of commercials, all I get is crap music anyway. If I had to drive from San Diego to L.A. with nothing but FM radio, I think I would kill myself.

Now Bluetooth and/or WiFi would be cool, but the fact of the matter is that there’s no way the RIAA or MPAA would let you get away with it, at least probably not without making a deal about crippling your device with DRM the way that Microsoft is outright maiming the Zune. As long as Apple toes the line and uses their DRM on iTMS (which is far more permissive than any of the other sad, sorry mp3 stores, unless you count the DRMless allofmp3.com whose legal status is, to put it mildly, a little shady), then the RIAA and MPAA can’t say shit about the fact that I can rip the CDs that I still buy into DRMless mp3s (or more exactly, AAC files) even though what they’d really like is for me to have to buy multiple versions of the same song. (Seriously, is the Zune even going to let you play DRMless music?)

I still think that stackable iPods are the way to go. 80 GB not enough for your song collection? Buy another one or two or three and network them via Bluetooth or wifi. And have them appear like one gigantic iPod to your Mac.

Again, I think that the Powers That Be™ would have a total shit-fit if Apple allowed DRMless file sharing, so unless we get rid of these guys, it’s unlikely we’ll be seeing a wireless iPod any time soon.

And iTunes: thank God it doesn’t abide by the usual Windows conventions. iTunes on Windows feels almost like iTunes on Mac OS X, and when I switch out of iTunes, I find myself shocked with horror that I’m in XP. As for ease of use, sure, there are people who are so tech-incompetent that you wouldn’t trust them with anything more complicated than a toaster, but as far as seamless integration goes, I’m all for the Mac OS X (or should I say NeXTSTEP?) way of making it “just work.” Plug in your iPod, boom (or blammo), you’re synced, and you didn’t even have to click on anything (except maybe for the stupid system-tray indicator in the taskbar) And if you’d rather manually pick and choose what you sync, more power to you, there is an option to do that. C’mon, compared to the average Windows app, iTunes is a no-brainer.

What will Jobs et al have in store for us in the next 5 years? Who knows. Maybe it’ll be another flop like the Cube (except, wait a minute, I’m typing this on a Mac Mini—surely I’m not the only one who sees the similarities.) Maybe it’ll be vaporware like Copland. Or maybe it’ll be a hyper-advanced technology that no mere mortal will grok, like the Newton (or NeXTSTEP.) Apple has been a loser company for far longer than this particular winning streak, and yet we’ve seen this company come back from the grave. Sure, it’s questionable whether or not Apple would survive sans Steve (and the ‘90s tells us that it probably wouldn’t), but for now, I say milk the guy’s brain for all it’s worth.

It is interesting that of all the home computer companies of the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, really only two have survived: Apple and IBM (requiescat in pacem, Commodore, Tandy, Atari) and IBM doesn’t make home computers any more, not even Thinkpads. (And interestingly, both have survived the juggernaut known as Microsoft Windows by jumping on the UNIX bandwagon—or I guess in the case of IBM, never letting go of it in the first place.) Five years ago I was still on x86 hardware running RedHat 7.0. I wonder where I’ll be five years from now?