Simple, elegant and capable of storing enough music to play users through the rest of their lives, the iPod is more than a beat ahead of the competition, writes Belinda McKeon
As is so often the case, a T-shirt caption says it all. Gollum, of Lord of the Rings fame, feverishly clutches his most prized possession and purrs "my precious". His gnarled form curls greedily around it. It glints. It gleams. It holds untold powers within itself. And, if the evidence of numerous Internet fan-sites are anything to go by, it drives all those who wear it stir-crazy.
It's not the Ring, of course. It's the iPod, the phenomenally successful digital music device which has revolutionised every aspect of the experience of buying and listening to music, and injected rude good health into the profit margins of its manufacturer, Apple.
Although it was launched by Apple in 2001, it's only in the last six months that the iPod has experienced a massive surge in popularity. Shops worldwide are struggling to meet demand for the cult object; in the Dublin Apple Centre, an order of 140 iPods sold within 24 hours in Christmas week. Nor has the interest been dulled by January blues; that store has a list of 40 people waiting on next week's delivery, while another, Back From the Future on Aungier Street, is fielding "eight to 10 calls a day from people who want to buy them", according to manager James McMahon.
David O'Neill, an electronic engineering student at the University of Limerick, and Urban Weigl, an IT worker from Germany living in Co Mayo, both in their early 20s, exemplify the profile of the Irish iPod user that dominated before the current boom in sales. Both are "early adopters" (as in, they bought an iPod soon after the launch of the product), both discuss iPods and other technological subjects on websites such as www.clubmac.ie and www.boards.ie, and both were motivated to make their purchase by dissatisfaction with existing digital music devices such as MP3 players, which, as against the 10,000-song storage capacity of the iPod, can hold only around 30 songs at a time.
These users attribute the recent swell in sales of the iPod to the energy invested by Apple last year in capturing the digital music market. There were new iPod models, an online music store, iTunes, offering 70 per cent of legally downloadable online music to iPod users via a connection between their iPods and their Mac computers, and, later, the extension of that software, for the first time, to users of PCs as well as Macs. All of this has given much greater clout to the iPod as a digital music device.
But there's a less technological explanation for the iPod boom, which saw it become the most popular Christmas present for the post-Santa generation.
"As a label, the iPod is the Gucci of MP3," says Mike Maloney , another early adopter. "Others, like the Creative Labs device, would probably be more like Wrangler."
A series of chic ad campaigns, a slew of awards from style magazines (and a Grammy for the iTunes software), and a constant appearance on the belt-clips of celebrities such as David Beckham and P Diddy, have nurtured a new, mainstream audience for the iPod, among the brand-conscious who are shopping for a lifestyle. However, with the iPod retailing here at prices from €350, for the model with the smallest storage power, to €550, for that with the highest, this is not a lifestyle that comes cheap.
For this reason, speculation was rife in the run-up to Apple's biannual trade show, Macworld, held on Tuesday in San Francisco, that Apple CEO Steve Jobs would announce a smaller, more visually striking iPod, with a relatively small storage capacity, specifically geared to capturing this growing market completely. A cheaper price-tag - of around $99 - was predicted.
The price announced on Tuesday, however ($249, only $50 less than the 15GB model), as well as the language in which the iPod mini was introduced - "fashionably compact", "trend-setting", perfect for a weekend away - suggests that Jobs intends to play this newer market of "late adopters" for every penny Apple can make.
A store supervisor at Dublin's Sandyford Compustore believes Jobs's tactic will work in Ireland.
"The shortage is such that people are willing to buy whatever model they can get," she says.
In the Back from the Future shop, however, McMahon is frustrated by the situation. He points to the problems with the iPod that are frequently aired by users here and abroad: an allegedly flawed battery life, which has led to a lawsuit against Apple in the US; the need for expensive secondary cables to use the iPod with PCs; the high cost of the device itself, and the unavailability of the iTunes Music Store in Europe, which prevents iPod owners from purchasing music online.
"I feel the iPod is being pushed into people's faces," he says. "They just don't consider the alternatives."
So far, rivals to the iPod - from companies such as Dell, Sony, Creative Labs and iRiver - have made no real dent in Apple's market share. Beside the iPod's compact minimalism, they look complicated and ungainly.
The biggest risk, as always for Apple, comes from Bill Gates's Microsoft. It learned both from Apple's ideas and its mistakes before, in the 1980s, when it pounced to produce cheaper versions of the Macintosh, the Apple computer which was revolutionary in its user-friendliness but prohibitive in its price.
On Thursday, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (a sort of Macworld for the rest of the technology industry), Microsoft unveiled its software for Creative Labs's Portable Media Centre, a digital device for storing music, photographs and video. It too, lacks the simple elegance of the iPod, and, with capacity for 175 hours of video and 100,000 photographs, seems to be trying too hard - but it also has the capacity for 10,000 songs, and has established licensing agreements with record companies through the online music store Napster. In other words, it represents direct competition to iPod and iTunes.
For now, at least, everyone wants a bite of the Apple. But the future is all to play for.
A portable digital music recorder and player produced by Apple Computer. Users transfer music to the iPod from other devices such as CD players and from files saved on their computers, as well as from the Internet music store, iTunes, which allows them to purchase and download individual songs and albums. The most recent generation of iPods come in three models, which differ in the amount of data (music and other files) they can store. The 15GB model can store 3,700 songs, the 20GB roughly 5,000 and the 40GB a staggering 10,000 songs.
Add to this its function as a hard drive (it can back up entire home computer drives) and accessories which enable it to act as dictaphone, digital camera card reader, car stereo, FM transmitter and even babysitter (according to Dublin user Hugh Chal, who hooks it up to speakers to play his children stories) and the loyalty it engenders among users - known as "poddies" - is understandable.