Off the Top of My Head

The New Aple Y-Pod

I do quite a bit of business with my office supplies catalog company. Most times they seem to have everything and with same day delivery, it’s usually an easy choice, even if they may cost just a bit more. Last month was a particularly busy month as I completely outfitted the new office. This included 2 desks, a packing table (just a big desk really), 3 filing cabinets, storage cabinets, and a couple of chairs. When I place a normal order I usually get a free gift thrown in. I can’t even count how many flashlights, backpacks, tents, and tins of biscuits I have received. This time, however, because of the value of my order they threw in a couple of mp3 players.

Now normally, the gift of not one but 3 mp3 players would make anyone happy. So what if I already own one, I figured I could keep one in the car, one in the house, another for the plane, etc. Yesterday I set up the first of them. Now I didn’t expect an amazing mp3 player but I was already a bit weary of how light these things were, but I figured it was just Chinese ingenuity. The second bad sign was nowhere on the packaging did it say what size they were and no instructions came with them. Normally I wouldn’t care but moments after turning it on, I realized there were no words but just cryptic pictures. After around 15 minutes of trial and error I figured out how to get the thing to play. One of the first quirks is if you play it at a volume less the 20, it squeals. If I had the instructions I could check and see if that was a “feature” but I’m pretty sure it’s because they are just plain cheap. That being said, I still used it as it was free and I have a hard time not taking advantage of free stuff. Today, I realized how cheap it really was. When you remove the dead battery and put a new one in, it somehow loses all the info you had previously stored on it. Suddenly it was Groundhog Day and I had to recopy the music back to it if I wanted to use it. That was it for me and I just dumped them.

What amazes me is they are in Retail packaging which means someone else actually parted with a few bucks of hard earned money for these. Maybe kids would want them but seeing as how a working mp3 with 128 can be had for like $25, I can’t see the attraction. Finally, I would post the name of the player in question but in what turned out to be their only smart move, the company not only didn’t put their name on the box, they didn’t even put it on the player itself.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 27th, 2006 at 9:18 am and is filed under Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.