When Do You Know The iPod Craze Has Gone Too Far?

David Johnston of RealTechNews writes:

Today I received a very interesting advertisement in the mail. It came from J&R, a retailer which I’ve purchased several things from in the past… enough to get me on the mailing list anyway. I normally like to pore over these kinds of tech advertisements just for fun and to make sure I’m not missing out on any cool gadget that I somehow hadn’t noticed before. Anyway, today as I was flipping through this latest advertisement, I started to notice something strange: the entire 32-page ad was exclusively for iPod accessories.

Even though I don’t own an iPod, I was intrigued as to how J&R’s was able to fill a 32-page advertisement with such homogenous products. There were, of course, six full pages dedicated to all the various kinds of iPod docks and external speakers you can get and an ample section for headphones and earbuds. The ad also included seven pages dedicated to the various sleeves, cases, and protective coatings that you could use with your iPod. However, along with the usual fare, I found some quite interesting accessories that brought mixed feelings of amusement, interest, and pity for the poor souls who are so iPod-crazy they would actually buy them.

A Fool And His Money…

The first of these products were the Tavo Gloves. These are, quite literally, gloves. But these aren’t just any gloves-these gloves allow you to still use the iPod clickwheel and other touchpads while wearing them. At $34.99, these gloves aren’t cheap either. On top of being expensive, they are don’t even look good in my opinion (though not nearly as bad as the Smart Glasses covered yesterday).

The second interesting product was the iPod DJ Mixer. At first glance, you might think this device is just another (expensive) dock, but it is so much more. The first thing that makes this product stick out is that it uses two iPod docks. That’s right, you can put two iPods on this mixer (makes sense, being a mixer, no?). I’m not sure why someone would have two iPods, but we won’t worry about that detail right now. This mixer apparently enables you to crossfade and mix tracks from the two iPods and one of the many line-in options. The unit itself has no speakers, but it has multiple outputs, including s-video in case you want to also mix video from two iPod videos.

Perhaps I just don’t understand something here, but I don’t know who is buying stuff like this. No self-respecting DJ would use a piece of equipment like this for parties, and it seems to be past overkill for the home user - not to mention expensive at $199.99 (the price quoted in the catalog was $249.99. Maybe other people are about as interested as I am in this thing).

I guess the real point of this article was to ask the question, “Do we really need this many iPod accessories?” RealTechNews has been covering many of these accessories (like the Marware Nano stand). Personally, I think enough is enough. You can only see so many cases, docks, and other accessories before you get burned out. I’ve noticed that I treat news about new iPod accessory news like white noise, passively filtering it out. It’s not that there aren’t any new accessories coming out, it’s that there are already far too many to really be excited about them anymore.

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