Say, remember when there was a little while when CNET was actually saying good things about Apple and its products all the time? Spooky, wasn't it? Well, thank goodness that's over with, so that now we can get back to reading articles such as this one pointed out by faithful viewer Paul: Five reasons not to buy an iPod. It's the number one player in the world, both by revenue and by unit sales, but CNET felt compelled to try really, really hard to find five reasons not to buy one. To his credit, columnist Eliot Van Buskirk did about as well as you could possibly expect: he found one legitimate gripe, and then tacked on four dodgy ones to meet his deadline.

First, the legit: yes, it's true that "six-plus hours of battery life is not always enough," although to be fair, neither is twenty. That said, the fact that Dell's iPod rip-off gets "almost 20 hours" of playtime (Dell claims 16) tells us exactly one thing: it's time for Apple to steal something from Dell for a change. Sure, Dell's player is a couple of ounces heavier, but surely that can't all account for an extra ten to fourteen hours of juice.

The dodginess dominates the article, though. "Jogging with a hard drive-based player is not cool"? His argument is that the iPod might skip, despite its 32 MB buffer, which seems pretty unlikely-- you'd have to prevent the iPod from accessing its hard disk until that 32 MB buffer were depleted, and we're going to assume that most people who jog don't do it while smacking their iPods against a brick for half an hour. Notice how he never says that his iPod skipped while he was jogging, or even that he heard that anyone else's has done it, either-- just that he thinks it's possible. Well, we here at the AtAT compound aren't joggers, but we are klutzes-- and we've dropped our iPods more times than we can count. We've had exactly zero skips in two years. Next.

"The iPod is expensive." Well, duh-- as long as it remains the number one portable music player on the market, that means people are still shelling out the dough to own a quality product, and Apple would be brain-achingly stupid to lower its price. In other words, it's expensive because there are these things called market forces which dictate that it can be; given the market share numbers, buyers who vote with their wallets agree that the iPod is worth every penny. Eliot's suggestion? Forget all about size, weight, interface, storage capacity, etc. and just get a $60 CD player (with MP3 capability) instead. (Gee, and so jogging with a CD player is cool and skip-free?) Next.

"You want to make high-quality digital recordings." Oooookay, well, sure, there are going to be folks out there who not only want a music player, but also want to be able to make soundboard recordings at live shows or something. But the fact that a couple of portable players offer this capability hardly seems like a reason to fault the iPod, especially since in addition to buying a Dell player for battery life and a CD player for cheapness, we now also have to throw in a Samsung or iRiver unit for recording capability. This one might as well be "You want a player that smells like peanut butter"; the iPod is a general market device and by definition won't cater to every niche. Next.

Ahhh, the most fatuous assertion of them all: "You want a choice in online music stores." Eliot admits that he "really enjoys" the iTunes Music Store, but feels "hemmed in" because the iPod doesn't give him the option of buying from BuyMusic.com or Napster instead. This is the same argument made by people who claim the Mac sucks because there's so much more software for Windows and then use nothing but Office, Quicken, and Internet Explorer. Just what, pray tell, is he expecting to happen? That some magical new service will teleport in from Fairyland and offer every song ever recorded for a penny each, but iPod owners will be screwed because the songs are all in WMA format? "Hemmed in." Sheesh.

In short, there's a reason why the iPod is still CNET's "favorite overall MP3 player," which is because in order to make up for each of the five shortcomings highlighted in the article, you'd have to buy three or four different players to do it. But Eliot still wins the Back-Handed Compliment of the Week Award for this gem: "Of course, if you don't care about low battery life, aren't fond of jogging, have ample disposable income, don't need to record/encode music portably, and want to purchase music downloads only from the iTunes Music Store, then the iPod is the best the [sic] way to go." Now that's a quote for Hot News, right there...