So as of Christmas morn, the AtAT staff is finally iPodified; never let it be said that Katie, AtAT's resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae, doesn't come through with the yuletide goods. We're pleased to report that, after spending a day with the thing, we can confirm that everything you've read about this little device is true. Well, all the good stuff, at least. And some of the bad stuff. But we can't confirm everything you may have read, because for all we know, you saw some article somewhere about how the iPod makes lovely julienne fries and cuts through a steel can and can still slice this tomato. And while we haven't actually tried any of that stuff, we're pretty sure that's not the case.

But the basics of what you've probably heard about the iPod do indeed apply: it's small, it's nifty, and if you try one and don't immediately entertain thoughts of selling your car to pay for one, you may want to check for a pulse. We plugged it into AtAT's main production G4 and about seven minutes later we had something like eighty albums' worth of music on it. For the record, we're not sure what kind of music the iTunes marketing staff is listening to these days, but we're guessing there isn't a healthy dose of punk rock in the mix, because all that stuff about "up to 1,000 songs" is hooey; at last count, we've got 1,127 tunes packed into this little white-and-silver doohickey, and every one of those songs was previously imported into iTunes at 160 kbps. And we've still got 750 MB remaining. "I like short songs!"

Anyway, aside from its tendency to pick up fingerprints whenever an ungloved hand passes within ten feet of its surface, so far there's only one thing about the iPod that we'd consider a drawback, and that's the fact that it didn't support Norwegian right out of the box. We don't actually speak Norwegian, mind you, but we've always found the language pleasing to look at, regardless, and thus the lack of Norwegian support on the iPod was an immediate thorn in our side. Luckily, we seemed to recall noticing that Apple had posted an iPod Updater 1.0.3 last Friday-- and that, in addition to improving MP3 sound quality and supporting long filenames, said update also included support for Brazilian/Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, and-- you guessed it-- Norwegian. Score!

Or so we thought. When we went to download the updater, we found that it had been unceremoniously yanked from Apple's servers last Sunday "due to incompatibilities with 'blue and white' Power Macintosh G3 systems." Denied! Is it just us, or does it seem that Apple has been forced to pull a lot of software updates and installers lately? Anyway, Apple promises a new version "shortly," but it's already been three days, and still nothing. (Granted, one of those days just happened to be Christmas, but that's hardly an excuse, is it?) We suppose we have no choice but to wait patiently and make do with Dutch in the meantime. But it's just not the same...