Talk to the Pod – New iPod feature!

I see that the new range of iPods are packed with new features. OK, I already knew that the iPod was much more than a simple MP3 player – the iPod Touch had WI-FI capability and I knew that you could download movies and play them on many iPods. I can see how far the iPod has come from the first 5MB ‘classic’ iPod. Since then, of course, we've had the iPod Mini, the iPod Nano, bigger and bigger capacity ‘Classic’ iPods and, of course, the iPod Touch, as already mentioned.

Some people have had their gripes about the iPod, a major one, surprisingly, being the lack of a radio tuner. Well, seeing as Steve Jobs was involved in the project from the start, perhaps this isn’t so surprising. After all, this is the man who turned Apple around in 1998 with the iMac – an all-in-one desktop computer that, thanks to Jobs’ purity of vision, lacked a floppy disk drive because floppy disks were inefficient, held a mere 1MB of data (and if you wanted to transfer a file smaller than 1MB there were better ways to do it), were unreliable and prone to errors (you can’t seriously be thinking of backing up on this, can you?) and, compared to CD media, they were expensive. So following that rationale, if you were the proud owner of a shiny new iPod with a playlist of all your all-time favourite music at your disposal, why would you want to be listening to the radio anyway? Answer, you wouldn’t. Right?

Well, this generation of iPods includes a radio tuner. And that’s not all. Amongst a host of new features I see the new generation iPod Nano even includes a video camera – although why you would want to make a video on an 8 or 16GB MP3 player escapes me. The only thing I think Apple could add to the mix now is a mobile phone – oh hold on a minute, that would be the iPhone (which also, coincidentally, browses the web, includes games and even plays MP3 files...)

So Apple, where to from here?

Actually there is one other feature that would be very useful. If you do an internet search on ‘iPod’ and ‘hearing loss’ you will find thousands of pages confirming what has long been suspected including this one from as early as 2005 – iPods, along with other portable music players that include earbuds that fit inside the ear canal are a very real contributor to hearing loss. In fact it is recommended that users listen to these devices for no longer than 60 minutes a day, at less than 60% of full volume. Greater exposure can cause permanent hearing loss in the middle ranges.

But try pointing this out to your kids and they just don’t want to know. In fact, when they have their iPods in it’s very hard to talk to them at all...

Which is why I suggest that future iPods should also include a very essential feature to compensate for the hearing loss of the iPod generation – an inbuilt hearing aid!

Lockie’s Bel Air

To me, this car personifies the excesses of 1950s American automotive design. Larger and lower than the classic ’57 model, the 1958 Bel Air dripped chrome. The heavy bodywork sat on top of a massive ‘X’ framed chassis and the whole car just floated over any irregularities in the road surface.

I was introduced to Lockie during my third form year. A friend who knew about my interest in aircraft took me to meet the elderly West Coaster, who had served with the RNZAF in the Solomon Islands as a navigator on PBY5 Catalina flying boats during the Second World War. Born and bred in Reefton, Lockie was driving a Rover P6 at the time, but he was a Chev man through and through. He didn’t like the Rover (“Poms can’t build a motor car, you need to be a contortionist to get into it”) and used to talk fondly of the Chevrolet cars that he had owned, particularly of “Old Goldie”, the 1958 Chev Biscayne with the Blue Flame motor.

A few years later during the school holidays Lockie phoned up one morning and told me that I had to get over there. “I’ve brought myself a Motor Car!” he exclaimed. And that’s all he said. He wouldn‘t tell me any more over the phone so I biked over at top speed, arriving to find the largest car I had ever seen sitting on the back lawn. Lockie was delighted with his buy, even though he said it meant that he would be living on bread and dripping for the forseeable future. He promptly presented me with the key. “Take it for a drive” he urged me.

I‘d never driven column shift before but could recall a friend’s older brother, who had an HD Holden sedan, showing me how it all worked. So I jumped in the car, crossed my fingers and off I went. I turned the key and the small block V8 started up, rolling the bodywork on its springs as I nudged the throttle. To a 17 year old, this was an unforgettable experience. What a contrast to Mum’s Morris 1300 – I was hooked!

During the time that Lockie owned the car I regularly got to drive it. Whenever I was finished I would reverse it into the garage so that the wall of chrome at the front was showing. Lockie even urged me to take it to school one day as he was sure this would do my mana no end of good, though I never took him up on the offer. Which is not to say that I didn’t attract attention from other sources. Such as the traffic cop who pulled me over when I had gone down to the dairy to get Lockie some milk (as I’d called in on my way back from school I was dressed in my school uniform) and asked me if I owned this car? When I stated truthfully that I didn’t and explained who the owner was I then had to wait while the MOT officer got on the radio to verify my story. Personally I think he had stopped me because he wanted to have a good look at the Chev!

But sadly Lockie didn’t get the same fun out of the Bel Air that I did. A fall that he had some years earlier had damaged his spinal cord, leaving him with a loss of mobility and a withered left arm, and he had difficulty working the column shift. And when a relative in the motor trade offered to swap the Bel Air for his 1966 Impala, complete with automatic transmission, Lockie accepted. But to me, it was never the same.

All that I have left of the Bel Air is the newspaper advertisement from when Lockie brought it. The headline reads A Piece of History and I see that the asking price was $3,500. While researching this illustration, I was amazed to find the same Bel Air on TradeMe, where it is listed for $35,000, which to me is a great return on investment! All these years later the upholstery is well worn but there are only a couple of signs of rust in the door panels.

Just goes to show, as the saying goes, “old Chevys never die...”