[aurynn]

Interestingly, I find having that low-level access to be more restrictive. Suddenly, a thing that I just want to work (in this case, the music player) requires that I think about how I'm going to put files onto it, what the best way to synchronise those files is going to be, whether or not I have to mount it myself, if I ought to write scripts to manipulate it, the feeling that I need to write scripts to manipulate it, else why have all of these programming skills?

When really what I wanted to do was just listen to music while I'm walking around, and have a limited amount of worrying when it comes to getting music onto the device. (IE, it Just Works territory) My behaviour is now circumscribed in other ways - my attention is split between things I really want to work on and this malaise of I ought to be crafting better tools to work with my music player.

"You can just set up rsync once!" is kind of a non-argument response to this - an Apple gadget, in this case, I set up nonce. Plug it in, it initializes, and syncs everything. Now I can listen to music where-ever I happen to be, and I don't have those circumscriptions to my attention.

If my Apple device annoys me sufficiently that I really want to have that level of control, there's a myriad of devices out there that automount as USB devices, that I could set up all sorts of nifty on-insert rules and script to high-heaven.

[gbog]

"I find having that low-level access to be more restrictive."

This look like an orwellian paradox to me, like "thinking less makes you free". Having low-level access don't mean you /need/ to use this power, it means that you /can/. Not having this power means you gave the keys to someone else. I'd rather keep most of the keys on my side, personaly.

The first time I saw an Ipod, it was at a party, in a friend of mine's hands, looked good, he had nice music, then I asked him to give me a few mp3, and it was "impossible right now". My god...

--> Never bought an Apple product myself (the Ipod I use is my wife's).