I finally gave in and bought an iPod, kind of as a belated birthday present to myself… Most of my colleagues have one, and I guess I was feeling left out. :)

I think my timing was pretty good, as Apple just restructured the pricing for their numerous iPod models. In particular, the regular 40GB model that I probably would have bought if I had bought my iPod a few weeks ago, has been phased out and replaced with the 30GB and 60GB iPod Photo models. Of course, I couldn’t resist the temptation and decided to go for the 60GB iPod Photo (which at $449 costs only another $50 more than the now obsolete 40GB regular iPod). If you’re thinking of buying an iPod anytime soon, do yourself a favor and get the iPod photo from buy.com in the next week or so, as they still sell the version that includes the accessories (dock, firewire cable, etc.) that Apple no longer includes with the new models. The actual iPod is the same as the previous model (the iPod photo only came out fairly recently), so you get the same improved battery life, etc.

At this opportunity, I also went ahead and bought a 6GB iPod Mini for my wife. She does not listen to as much music as myself, and therefore should benefit more from the extremely small and convenient size of the Mini than the sheer capacity of the regular iPod or iPod photo.

According to pretty much everybody else I know who has an iPod, this is how it starts, and we should expect to turn into Apple fanatics very soon… I certainly wouldn’t mind to have a nice PowerBook instead of my WIntel laptop…

In the mean time, I need to track down some good software for managing my iPod (which is due to arrive tomorrow) under Linux. It’s too bad that there’s no Linux version of iTunes, but it looks like there are some decent alternatives. In any case, I don’t expect to do a whole lot of syncing once I’ve loaded up my 60GB iPod. :)