Pono

March 13th, 2014. Posted in: Pono Player.

I was resisting the temptation all day to support Neil Young’s kickstarter campaign. Maybe I’ve seen too many Gail Vaz Oxlade shows on Slice, or maybe it’s my inner hipster-guilt from contributing to giant pools of plastic in the ocean.

But a few minutes ago while listening to Led Zeppelin through my dying iPod (geek: 256kbps LAME encoded MP3’s from 1994 Remaster, on iPod 5th Generation running Rockbox) and looking for ways to procrastinate, I pledged $300 for a yellow pono player. For an extra $100 I could have got a limited-edition chrome and black version with Neil’s signature laser-etched on the side, but my income doesn’t put me in the “having an extra $100” demographic – so I got the ugly yellow one. Why the ugly yellow one? Well, because the pono t-shirts are ugly yellow, and even Neil’s pono is ugly yellow.

Firstly, Neil made the USB connector shaped like a USB connector. Unless you are the weirdo that enjoys owning six chargers for six devices, this should just make sense.

I have a feeling Neil’s goal with this isn’t long term success. For now, it looks like he’s making a high-quality music player with expandable-memory and a built in headphone amp that can play any file-format. He’s also releasing insanely high-definition remasters in an open-source format which has no DRM to stop the files from being copied and pirated. #NYFTW

Oh damn, I hope they didn’t also design a slightly thinner version with a built-in camera to release in 6 months at half the price…