(02/11/05)
Some products are pretty awesome, but I always wonder why some expensive, inferior product dominates in market share. And then I remember that people are retarded and buy things in herds.
- Tivo
- Don't get me wrong; I think DVRs are the greatest development in home electronics of the last 5 years and second to only the DVD player in the last 10 years. The problem I have is that the Tivo brand dominates the market. What's wrong with Tivo, you ask? Well for one thing, they track your usage. They know what you're watching, what you're recording, what you're replaying, and what you're skipping. They display advertising, and it's only going to get worse. This is exactly what happened with most of the stuff you loved on the internet, from KaZaA to AIM - advertisers and marketeers have screwed it up with tracking software and ubiquitous advertising. Another thing is that $12/month is pretty damn expensive, when it's not that hard to make your own? Or you could pay $10/month for an HDTV DVR from your cable company (without throwing down the hundreds that the box itself costs). And most importantly, Tivo's stupid BLOOP BLOOP sounds send me into an uncontrollable fit of rage.
- Apple iPod
- Let's face it - the iPod is great, but hardly a better value than its competitors. This new Napster subscription service looks pretty promising for being able to update your MP3 player with whatever songs you want for a flat rate, instead of $1 a song. Regardless, we all know that almost none of the tracks on any given iPod were legally downloaded from iTunes, and the rest of the tracks can be played on any of the other competing players. You know, the ones with better battery life, better sound quality, and a lower price tag? For some retarded reason, nearly every person I know with an iPod never even compared it with other MP3 players from Sony, Creative, or Dell, and they can't even tell me what the pros and cons of each are. And they actually spent a week's pay on their iPods. Well, that does it - all my friends hate me now because I just called them retarded.
- Camera Cell Phones
- I will be honest - I own one. But seriously, who needs this camera feature? I only bought mine because I wanted a color phone capable of web access, and it just so happened that the cheapest one had a camera on it. But this camera has been more trouble than it's worth. I can't bring it into government buildings because they prohibit cameras. Plus the concept is stupid. The carriers are only trying to sell data packages to unsuspecting customers.
- Ionic Breeze
- This thing is worthless. It doesn't really do anything. It doesn't filter well enough to be worth anything, and I definitely could never recommend this product for more than $50. Actually, I don't think that I'd buy it for $30. It's not as easy to clean as the commercials would have you believe - it tends to pick up oily dust that sticks to the grid.
Go and justify your irrational purchases in the comments.
