My Son's MP3 Players: Then and Now


It is time to finish up Christmas shopping for the year, and like a good little geek I was doing it online. My parents sent us a check to purchase gifts for our children, and my high school age son decided his two year old iPod needed to be replaced. Actually it has lost its left channel on the headphone jack so it was time to spend my parents' money and buy their oldest grandson a new iPod media player. He wanted the 4th generation 32GB black iPod Touch so I had to do some quick surfing to see where to order it. I know the local Galleria Apple Store, the Brentwood Micro Center, Best Buy and Target are all selling them for $299.99, but we would also have to pay Missouri and city sales tax (both Brentwood and Richmond Heights have the same steep total sales tax of 8.425%.) The total with tax would be $325.27 plus the fun of visiting a local retailer during this holiday season. So I looked online and, sure enough, Amazon.com was selling them for $269.99 with free shipping and no sales tax, a savings of over $55. Plus I get to sit here at home and let the delivery people bring it to my front door. To calculate your own savings you can use my shopping local versus online calculator that I wrote last year.

That means I can probably soon be using my son's older iPod Touch (with one working audio channel) since I always inherit his old technology. Not only am I using his old cell phone, and his old digital camera, but I have both of his older MP3 players, a 1GB Creative Zen V and a 256MB Creative Muvo N200. That N200 still works fine after six years, even after he dropped it in the toilet when he was in elementary school.  It is hard to believe a 256MB MP3 player cost $60 back in 2005, but I found the NewEgg receipt in my GMail and that is what we paid for it. Frankly it plays music just as well as my son's new $300 iPod Touch will, and it is more portable too! And replacing the battery on it is so simple, since I just open it up and slide in a charged up a NiMH rechargeable AAA. I was just using it today to listen to some tunes while riding home on the MetroLink. For a 10 minute ride from the Wash U Danforth campus to the Richmond Heights station parking lot, I really do not need 32GB of music, and 256MB is plenty big, even if the new iPod will have 128 times more space.
High tech media player, circa 2005

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