(no subject)

[odditycollector]

I've glanced at a few SGA fics over the past couple days, and I've noticed a common item which never fails to make me mentally grimace a little.

Rodney McKay's iPod.

It may have been that there was a different opinion of the things in 2003 or whenever it was that the Atlantis mission set out, but I cannot imagine Rodney buying one. He's far too much of a snob as far as electronic devices go.

I've acquired this knee-jerk reaction from conversations with people in my computer classes and others who waste time thinking about tech. iPods are considered to be mostly a success of marketing - fashionable, sure, but overpriced, technologically wasteful, and unreliable. The battery, especially in the earlier models, had a tendency to fail almost immediately after the one year mark, when the warranty expired.

The interface, on the other hand, is inspired. But that isn't enough.

A few people had iPods (me included), but these without fail were gifts from well-meaning relatives (or at least no one is willing to admit to plopping money down on one). I will allow that this might be the case for Rodney as well, but if so he would have grumpy thoughts at it occasionally when using it.

I suppose, given that other common themes of SGA fic include body-switching, gender-switching and species-switching, I might be choosing a *weird* thing to complain as unbelievable. And if Rodney has actually been seen with one on the show I'll take it back... or at least shake my head at the creators of the show instead.

Comments

[derryderrydown.livejournal.com]

The explosion of Mac advocates when they suddenly became trendy is what steered me away from, "Meh, maybe if I had enough money and time to spend learning a new OS," towards, "EVIL! Evil Mac! Waste of money! Pah! Pah! Pah!" And iPods were an important part of that.

I have a Creative Zen. Which was sixty quid less than an equivalent iPod, has a battery that lasts and that can be replaced without having to ship the whole kit and caboodle off to Apple, and that I love dearly and point-blank refuse to be separated from for any length of time.

And considering I keep being told that Macs are more reliable than PCs, it's my friends with Mac laptops that seem to keep on shipping them back to base for repairs.

So I am now an anti-Mac. (Admittedly, PCs are also largely rubbish, but they're a lot cheaper, don't come with all the trendy bullshit attached, and I don't have people constantly telling me they're wonderful.)

[odditycollector.livejournal.com]

(Admittedly, PCs are also largely rubbish, but they're a lot cheaper, don't come with all the trendy bullshit attached, and I don't have people constantly telling me they're wonderful.)
*laughs* I think that's the most convincing argument I've yet heard to join the cause.

I'm not *against* Macs... I don't usually like using them, but that's just because I'm too lazy to learn the interface. And besides, it's funny to watch when the Prof's laptop fights with the classroom projector system. *nods*

I've heard good things about Zens. My iPod is nearing the end of its expected lifespan (it's already twitchy) and that's one of the ones I'm considering to replace it. (I've become addicted to 24hr music. It's sad, I know.)

[fenris_wolf0]

Samsung has the best players in my opinion, but why get an mp3 player when for a little more money you can get everything in a Palm PDA like, say, the T5?

Plays music, audio, photos, videos, ebooks, browsing, MS Office documents and oodles more. Like having a PC in the palm of your hand: it's incredibly versatile.

[ellex42.livejournal.com]

iPod is pretty much the only thing I've seen available, although I haven't exactly bothered to investigate that much. Frankly, the price of an iPod kind of put me off the entire concept of such a device.

What other devices are available? Everyone else I know seems to be using their cellphones, which ends up being even more costly than an iPod? What do you think McKay would have?

I also agree with the comment discussion about Macs. I understand most professional writers swear by them for word processing, and I'll admit that there are things I'd like to do that Microsoft Word 2003 doesn't seem to have the capacity for...but I've used Macs, and found them to be slow, obstinate, and even more confusing than Windows, which is at least user-friendly.

[scribewraith.livejournal.com]

He'd have a minidisc, much for the same reasons I do: much better sound quality, not restricted by size of the harddrive - you can get discs which go up to 1GB which gives you hours of programming and the joys of sorting and cataloguing each disc.

He'd have one of the better than mine ones though that can record voice as well so he can pontificate on leadership for hours...

;)

[nightchik.livejournal.com]

There should be fic where John gives him an iPod and Rodney gets all cranky and ungrateful about it.

[stellahobbit.livejournal.com]

If we're going to be serious about this (and I freely admit that I'm a Mac person) then chances are that Rodney would be fully conversant with Mac operating systems. He'd have used the computers while working in universities (members of academia are generally big users) and there are programs that people in specialised professions (i.e. graphic designers) use because they're the best, and the use Macs because the programs run faster and smoother than they would on a PC. Astrophysicists would want computers that could crunch big numbers and display 3D images in real time, therefore Macs are the way to go.

I can't see Rodney using an iPod because I don't think he'd be the type of guy to lug one around to listen to his music; he's got more important things to think about.

If we're not being serious, then yeah, down with commercialism and people jumping onto a bandwagon ;-)