Clarke's First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist says something is possible, he is almost certainly right. But when he says something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” http://www.lsi.usp.br/~rbianchi/clarke/ACC.Laws.html

In particular, rock*, I did not insinuate anything about the iPhone being "the next pepperoni pizza." I was simply making a comparison between technology and pizza, or ice cream, religion, or anything else where people seem to think that others who don't share their preference ought to die in a fire. It's as if people's minds are so simple that they cannot handle multiple entrants into a market. One would make choice all so much more simple; you'd not have to worry about being wrong or uncool if all the cars come in black.

I appreciate that you took the time to comment, but you missed the point. There's always some debate going on, Wii vs PS3 vs Xbox, Mac vs PC, Intel vs AMD, and one side just can't be happy unless they make the other side feel inferior. People are so binary, my choice is correct, yours is wrong. I understand when you spend a lot of money on something, you want to feel that your purchase was justified, but to spend your own time trying to make another person feel bad about their own preferences, it just seems inhuman, that's all.

If you're not excited about the iPhone, then just ignore the story. A prediliction with making other people feel bad just because one does not approve of their preferences could be misinterpreted as a lack of social skills or of sanity.

Sometimes I get the feeling that if this was a pizza blog instead of a technology blog, some of you would accuse those of us who like pepperoni pizza as being "pepperoni pizza zealots" just because you prefer mushrooms on yours.

Can't we all just get along? Don't you have anything constructive to contribute rather than levying ad hominmen attacks on people who don't validate your own preferences?

BEGIN ENGADGET COMMENT
[Pseudo intellectual comment to make it look like I read the article here]

[link to my weblog here, which is why I posted the comment]
END ENGADGET COMMENT

I don't want to get your pocket protectors in a a tizzy, but really, come on. The vast, vast majority of customers don't care about DRM. The people who shop online for music are instead pretty happy with whatever it is that makes buying music online possible. While the don't-pay-for-anything-istas might get excited about the concept of DRM "failing", 1) it's not, and 2) given that you aren't going to buy most online music anyway, nobody cares what you have to say.

You can always go use perfectly good services like eMusic. In the mean time, so long as the record labels continue to make money under any business model, they will not change their tune. And remember, the online stores take orders from the record labels; if they pick up and go home, nobody really wins, other than apparently the whiny live-in-your-parents'-basement demographic that seems to frequent these boards.

Really, Nate, I've looked over your posting history here and the banal and yet uniformly pro-Zune stuff you post makes me very suspicious of you and Microsoft's advertising initiative. It makes me not want the product when I see all the fake advertising it's getting. Hiring people to feign enthusiasm on blogs is one of the lowest things they can do. Real people don't talk about "big buzz" on their "campus" or "venues oline". Particularly when as a real college student I know that barely anybody is talking about the product? In my school paper's technology section yesterday -- launch day -- there was no commentary about the Zune. Instead, the real "buzz on campus" has been about video game consoles.

G Slusher: but why are people trying to compare it to the 80 GB one. It's a 30 GB model, so the weights and dimensions should be compared to that. Thus, it is 0.3 in taller (to provide about that in additional screen size) and 0.15 in thicker, and weights nearly an ounce more. That's pretty substantially larger.

Also, it costs $38 more than the nano at that size.