Every Thursday is Simplicity day at Living Behind the Curve.

Ever since geeks and paranoid isolationists collectively pulled their hair out over Y2K, the entire planet has been swept up in a personal gizmo renaissance – excepting Japan, of course, which seems to have always tapdanced on the bleeding edge of blinking electronic evolution. Gazillions of batteries give their lives every year to feed our need for little injection-molded pieces of plastic that go “bloop!” in a friendly manner. Second only to cellphones, iPods are arguably the iconic personal gizmo of our time.

Think about it. Those white earbuds are so recognizable, Apple didn’t need to show anything else in their ads for a while there. They’ve spawned two separate neologism classes: iNouns and Podverbs. Gig for gig compared with thir competitors, they’re very affordable (though in true Apple style, only just barely), they work ridiculously well, and they’re easy to use. Even the proprietary program that gets the music into your iPod, iTunes, is the best in its class. iPods are freaking awesome.

And I don’t own one.

Don’t get me wrong, I heart the digital music revolution. I was all over Napster when it first came out, and I’ve spent weekends ripping my CDs onto my hard drive. I’ve even forsaken radio for podcasting — I’m an audiophile of the nerdiest persuasion. But I’ve done it all without needing or wanting an iPod, and here’s why: it never made financial sense.

Before you think I’m completely nuts, I do have an MP3 player. It’s a 6 year old Rio something or other MP3CD player I bought for my car, and hooked in through one of those little tape player adapter jobbies. It’s still out there in my car, and while it’s a little worse for wear with scratches and coffee stains, it still works perfectly fine. I bought it in the spring of 2001 for 99 bucks. It’ll play 1 800mb CDR at a time, has a little screen to tell you everything you want to know, and can navigate through any folder scheme you can think of.

The first iPod came out in October 2001, just a few months after I purchased my Rio, to the tune of 400 bucks for 5 gigabytes, or $500 for 10. They didn’t really get popular until 2004, with the 4th gen iPod and the iPod mini, and you’d still pay between $250 and $450 for anything between 4 and 60 gigabytes of space. It wasn’t until January 2005 that you could buy a Shuffle for $99, and it wasn’t until some time in 2006 that you could buy a Shuffle for $99 with more memory space than my CDRs.

Yes, you’re reading that right. It took Apple *5 years* to create an MP3 player of sufficient storage and price to compete with my pathetic little Rio, and I *still* like the Rio better simply because, unlike a Shuffle, it has a screen. I wouldn’t have gained a damn thing besides more credit card debt and possibly some street cred if I’d bought an iPod.

OK, full disclosure time. Fall of last year, ironically when it became reasonable for me to consider buying an iPod, I decided to upgrade my setup. I’d fallen in love with podcasts, and I needed a more convenient solution for my car. Burning music onto discs is fine when you plan to listen to them over and over, but podcasts are disposable. You, if you’re me, listen to them once and move on. I tried to keep up, but it just took more time than I wanted to keep me in ear candy for my ride to work. I consulted Google for ideas, and ended up spending $30 for a little in-car FM transmitter, and I stole a 1 gig USB flash drive from Dani that she got free from a vendor at work. Now I dump podcasts on the flash drive (downloaded, sorted and stored in iTunes, thank you very much), dial in a dead channel, and go. Easy peasy cheapskate.

I’m not against iPods, or Apple. Apple makes good products, or at least I assume they do, since I’ve never purchased one myself. There has to be a “there” there, though, because Apple survived and thrived against PC clone market domination, even if only as some weird counter-cultural status symbol. iPods have even surpassed beer in some studies that ask college students what they like to do most in their free time. iPods are freaking cool, but dollar for dollar they just don’t seem to make a whole lot of sense.

The question isn’t why I haven’t upgraded. The question is, why did you?