(Originally posted Nov. 5, 2010)

I’ve have had very little music in my life lately. This is largely because I lost my entire iTunes library when my old hard drive crashed. Less than a week after my hard drive died, my iPod inexplicably broke. The scientific explanation is that my iPod and my original hard drive were deeply in love and the iPod did not want to live in a world without the hard drive.

I will eventually need/want to replace the iPod. I’m not a rabid Apple fan geek, but the thought of using anything but an iPod for my music…I might as well be using the Fred Flintstone record player made from a bird and a rock.

So which iPod do I choose? My old one was a four-year-old iPod Nano, which came with my computer. It only held one Gig of music, which was a little tight, but got the job done. If I buy a new Nano, I can store at least 8 Gigs of music (for you technical illiterates: 8>1). Of course, I could also upgrade to something that holds pictures and video. I could even keep art samples on it and carry it around like a little portfolio. But, I don’t really need anything but music, and I don’t need to pay a hundred dollars for non-necessities. But then, even the cheapest new iPod would cost over a hundred dollars. It almost seems foolish to spend that much money already, only to then get stingy and miss out on the extra features. Apple has arranged their price structures perfectly. If you have enough money to consider buying something, you have enough to at least consider the next level products.

This is the definition of a first world problem, where one of the most remarkable things on my mind this week is how much money should I spend on a luxury item for myself. There is probably someone out there reading this who is listening to music on a 1986 walkman with the knobs broken off. Since the beginning of this entry, this person has been wondering if I will ever acknowledge that buying an iPod is a non-problem.

-Marj