I bought a 60gb iPod yesterday and I realized shortly after I bought it that it was the first Apple product I’ve ever purchased (at least I’m pretty sure that’s true). That’s not because I’ve avoided Apple in the past, I just never really bought any of their products though I’ve always been attracted to them. I still think the day will come when I’ll get one of their laptops (especially now that Boot Camp and Parallels are around) but I guess I’m taking baby steps.

Anyway, it was an interesting experience. I’ve always heard how Apple’s packaging was even awesome. I actually bought two products yesterday: the actual iPod and a universal dock. Both were packaged similarly and I guess you could call it “nicely” packaged but I wouldn’t say it amazed me (not a bad thing really as I doubt it makes much sense to amaze someone with packaging but I just didn’t know what to expect based on all I’ve heard in the past).

One thing however did really impress me: the dock adapters (scroll down and you’ll see one) that come with it. I was wondering if I was going to have trouble with the universal dock since all of these iPods seem to be slightly different sizes nowadays and I’ve had so many devices that never really were great fits for their docks/cradles in the past (even ones that were specifically made for each other) that I was thinking this was going to be painful. When I opened up the iPod box and saw the adapter I couldn’t really figure out what it was for. I opened the universal dock and found that it had more of them (one for each iPod model out there) and then I understood. I slipped the adapter into the dock and the iPod fits perfectly into it. Nice job on that, as well as the looks of it–it fits perfectly into the cradle and is barely noticeable.

Installing it was smooth and it’s definitely a very simple and intuitive device. It does look really nice and I’d almost say it has a personality even. Everything’s sort of small too. For example, the jack on the earphones is pretty tiny and even the USB plug is smaller than all of the other USB plugs I have seen (almost half the size).

I then tried iTunes for the first time and was admittedly confused for a bit. This is one thing I’m not sure is the right way to go. It seems their following Mac UI design but on a Windows application. So it immediately looks a bit different most Windows apps. But aside from looks there were usability issues I was having (though chances are it’s more of a discoverability/past experience problem than anything else). For example, it took me a while to figure out how to get it to just play an album’s worth of music on repeat. I figured I’d just select the tracks and play them (which I did by right-clicking and choosing “play next in party shuffle”). This wasn’t really what I was looking for but I just moved on and since yesterday I’ve discovered a few other ways of doing things which work well.

One thing I’ve noticed is fairly consistent is a lack of configurability (on both the iPod and iTunes). This is probably how things remain so simple–the less options you have the less confusing things are I guess–but I guess I’m left wondering if things are possible or not. For example, I’d like to have the iPod’s backlight to be on when it’s docked. I know how to turn the backlight to be on at all times and how to set it so it turns off after a certain time but I don’t see how you can tell it to be on all the time when docked and use the powersaving time-based mode when not docked. I’m left thinking you just can’t do that now. On iTunes, I can’t figure out how to remove one of the machines I’ve “authorized” in the past (it seems I tried it ages ago but I’m sure that machine no longer exists) but is now just taking up one of my five “authorized” machine slots.

Another example, is how it syncs photos. My main gripe is how when it syncs photos it pauses whatever music’s playing on iTunes (on the desktop) and “optimizes” each and every photo in the folder I configured it to sync for photos. This process isn’t fast and for some reason doesn’t happen in the background. It displays a modal dialog on iTunes and stops the music. What makes it more painful is how it seems to do this every time I dock the iPod. It goes through each and every photo even if that folder hasn’t changed one bit since the last time it sync’d up. Am I missing something? I then went to the preferences dialog and tried to set it to manually manage my photos but it turns out that’s not an option for photos (it is for podcasts and songs though). If I don’t figure out how to avoid the long wait everytime I dock I might end up not syncing photos with it though that seems like a bit of a waste. I also can’t think of a technical reason why this doesn’t just happen in the background. Not the end of the world though, as I definitely bought it more for the music, but still less than ideal.

I hope to figure some of these things out or get used to different ways of doing things as I have been already noticing I’ve been doing with iTunes. It’s not perfect though. It kind of tells me software in general still has a ways to go. The interesting part is how I’m still rather happy with the purchase even though my experience hasn’t been as good as I was expecting. I guess the simplicity (which somewhat translates to lack of customization/configurability) can frustrate someone who’s used to tweaking each and every piece of software but the fact that it all does work as advertised and the fact that it’s all so pretty kind of makes me still think it’s not bad at all. We’ll see how it goes over time as I’m sure this still might be a honeymoon period for me and the little device I swear has a personality.