Stop the presses! Reholster those credit cards! We know that, for the past several weeks, we've been saying that the iPod makes a perfect gift this holiday season, but it has just come to our attention that we were apparently completely incorrect in that assessment. Far from being the ideal present, it turns out that the iPod is actually one of the very worst gifts you can give someone this year. Forgive us-- we had no idea. The evil people at the Apple store (not to mention just about every single review of the product) informed us otherwise. We feel terrible about this.

See, faithful viewer Mike Lee noticed that some outfit called TechTarget (we've never heard of them, but with a name like that, they clearly have their finger on the pulse of today's technology market!) decided to ask a thousand "computing professionals" what gadgets they considered to be the best gifts this year. Unfortunately, the iPod didn't fare nearly as well as we'd hoped; indeed, it actually made the list of "Top Five Worst" presents. And so, in the absence of any actual information about how this poll was conducted or who these "computing professionals" were (aside from the blurb at the bottom mentioning that TechTarget's audience consists of enterprise IT professionals-- surely the funnest of the fun when it comes to computer workers, and with a heavy concentration of Mac users, we bet, too), we're forced to agree with TechTarget's press release: the iPod is a really crummy gift for enterprise IT professionals, and therefore, by extension, it's obviously also a crummy gift for people who don't think Dell erred drastically in retiring beige in favor of that far more distracting grey.

Yes, despite the fact that for all we know every single one of those 1,000 enterprise IT professionals might work at Compaq where iPod use might be a firing offense, being naturally trusting folks, we're taking these results as gospel. Of course, we feel terrible about having misinformed you all. Tell you what we're going to do; if any of you out there already rushed right out and bought your loved ones iPods to stow under the tree/next to the menorah/near the nondenominational holiday shrub, first of all, this is what you get for not waiting until the last minute. Shame on you and your promptness. But secondly, since it's partially our fault that you bought such crappy gifts, we'll bite the bullet and buy those iPods from you for, say, $200 apiece. (Depreciation.) Heck, it's the least we can do under the circumstances.