iPod Partisanship

Early this week, a Philadelphia-area journalist Neil Santos wrote about his very close brush with President-elect Barack Obama in a gym:

My morning routine usually starts off the same way every day. Wake up, go to the gym, grab a coffee and go to work.

But when you get patted down by the Secret Service at the gym first thing in the morning, you know something’s up. I hopped on my usual treadmill and put on CNN. The news ticker scrolled frantically across the screen, as footage of the President-elect was shown over today’s topic — "Is Obama Black or Biracial?"

It wouldn’t be long before I could ask the man myself, as he walked majestically across the gym floor in his track pants and sweat shirt. I did a double take, and soon after that, looked around the gym to see if anyone else knew he was here. Nobody seemed to notice.

But he hopped on the machine next to me and broke a mean sweat while reading a copy of USA Today and listening to his Zune.

While a number of commentators congratulated Santos on his Obama experience, his brief post quickly became a much bigger deal because of that last little detail. Obama was listening to “his” Zune.

Apparently this was a big deal, because Obama had earlier claimed to be a Mac user (not a PC).  The revelation that Obama was jamming  a Zune undermined Obama’s Mac-ness and this caused a disturbance among the dorks. Never mind that Santos quickly clarified he wasn’t sure it was Obama’s Zune. The so-called “Zunegate” somehow became a big deal:

• Gizmodo: “After all of the misinformation and dirty lies spread about Obama over the course of the presidential campaign, this is the most shocking I’ve heard about him: He uses a Zune. This can’t be possible. Why? Because, as has been widely reported, Obama, many of his staffers and Joe Biden use a Mac. And well, Zunes don’t work on Macs and … my mind is blown.”
• Prefix: “Super sales or not, to have the first media player be anything but an iPod would be a huge lump of coal in Steve Jobs’ stocking.”
• James Poling: “You can’t run an election claiming you own an iPod and garnering people’s votes then after you win suddenly start toting around a Zune.  That’s just not cool.”
• Mac News World: “Fans of the iPod want proof of what they consider betrayal by the president-elect, who is known to use that brand. An Obama spokesperson confirmed he typically uses an iPod and said she didn’t know where the Zune came from.”

As you can see, the whole thing blew up big enough that our new President actually had to deny using a Zune in order to quell the restless iPod fanboys.

Zune vs  iPod. PC vs. Mac.  BlackBerry vs. iPhone. I know a few people who take sides in these debates, but I can’t get excited about this crap. It wouldn’t surprise me or shatter my image of Obama to know that he borrowed someone’s Zune and thought, “Oh, hey, this plays FM radio. Maybe I can use this today.” Hell, I use a Sandisk mp3 player for exactly that reason. It’s not as pretty or as well-designed as the iPod, but it’s cheaper and I can listen to NPR when I walk the dog.

Come to think of it, Obama’s flirtation with the Zune is the kind of pragmatism I’m expecting from the President. I hope he avoids “Mac vs. PC”-style ideology and chooses the right tool for the job under whatever circumstances present themselves.

Advertisers work hard to convince us that brands matter. And some products achieve a kind of a market-share obviousness, such that even your clueless parents know iPod is the Coke of mp3 players. But if my dad or the President told me they wanted to listen to NPR at the gym or take voice memos, I’d have to buy them a different model. I’m not saying that’s why Obama was sporting the Zune, but it’s a better reason than, “I’m a PC.”