I was at a mates place last Saturday. She just bought a new iMac. She’s also got a black iPod. Being the hardcore tech journalist that I am, I walked up to have a look. I’ve seen an iMac before, I’ve seen a black iPod before, but no matter how many times I see them, there’s something that still inspires a bit of awe, especially from a device like an iPod that has a whopping 160GB hard drive in it.

Sitting at her desk I started to flick through the hundreds of albums she has in her digital music collection (but still only used 25GB of space). She has a great taste in music, don’t get me wrong, but every now and then would come the statement from behind my back, “that’s crap, I don’t even know why I have it on there.”

And there’s the problem. When MP3 players were just becoming popular, and their capacities were at the 10GB stage, we were somewhat more cautious about the music we put on them, and indeed, the music we bought. But with the influx of extremely large capacity players, not just from Apple, but from the likes of Creative, Archos and others, it seems that we’re now just filling them for the sake of filling them.

What was once a collection of music your heart would beat to has now become just a random collection of whatever was lying around on your bedroom floor, your mates lounge room, your cousins computer or on internet torrent sites (not that anyone at gadget zone condones the downloading of illegal music).

Sadly, I myself am an iPod owner and collector of digital music I don’t even like. I didn’t need to buy an iPod with that much storage, but I did. Why? Because it looks damn good and it’s hard to say “no” to 160GB of storage. I justified it by saying I can use it as a hard drive as well, and that it’s great value (which it is).