The many mysteries of consumer electronics
One of the coolest/strangest things on our trip out to the UK was the discovery that the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport now has vending machines selling iPods, as well as headphones, chargers, and digital cameras! We’ve reached the point where we can buy computers in vending machines, a slight change from the "build a building and hire a staff to support the new computer" culture of 30 to 40 years ago.
Wow.
It would be interesting to look at the sales figures on these things. You’d have to have a reasonable amount of gear with you to make a new iPod useful (i.e., to upload music to it), and the kind of folks that carry that sort of gear would seem to already be iPod (or similar) kind of folks. Maybe the small ones like Shuffles and Nanos appeal to people who want to replace or augment a larger (perhaps older) iPod. As bryankennedy pointed out, the money is probably in things like the headphones (”Ooh, I’ll buy those nifty sound canceling jobbies before I board.”), and the iPods are there as much for attention and advertising as anything.
Perhaps inspired by the whole iPod vending machine thing in the airport, I ended up taking some photos of reflections in the back of the new iPod we purchased to be the "family stereo" while we’re in the UK, separated from our CD collection.
I also caught WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy jamming out to their iPods on the flight over :-).
We bought our first cell phone two days ago because it was just too awkward trying to find a place to rent without any phone number to give people. WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy are just too pleased with themselves over this, despite the fact that we bought to cheapest phone we could lay our hands on. It has been terribly helpful, though, so it was a good thing. We actually put down a deposit on an apartment today, so we’re hoping to have an address and a chance to finally unpack our suitcases sometime next week.
Lastly, I dumped up a bunch of photos from the trip so far (including this shot of the University of Essex) on my “events” account on Flickr. The bored among you should feel free to wonder over and have a look.
