I had planned to make all kinds of comments about a Gizmodo post yesterday afternoon, which complained bitterly about the new iPod Nanos and their incapability to work properly with the Nike+ attachment. The only thing that stopped me was that, within about an hour, the posted had been yanked.
Fortunately, Digg provides an inedible archive for these sorts of little embarrassments, granting me a successful sanity check to prove I didn’t imagine the whole thing. The gist of the post was that a critical bug in the Nike+ software was betraying Apple’s sliding commitment to quality – namely, if you try to run a workout with a selected playlist, all you’ll get is silence.
This, according to the heartbroken post, was a sure signal that Apple must come to Jesus and admit its flaws at last. Bells and whistles we can live without, it averred, but when you can’t even play music on your music player, things are in a bad state indeed.
To this discussion, I would simply like to add one point: The Nike+ has never worked, but I love mine anyway.
I bought mine at the end of December in 2006, along with a refurbished black 4GB Nano, to kick off my 2007 running year. I had a goal of covering 1,000 miles (200 to go, for anyone keeping track), and I figured this was a fun and inexpensive way to help me stay motivated. The Nano was a small enough widget in comparison to my 60GB iPod, and the Nike+ kit was only another fifty bucks on top.
Not bad, except you have to really want to use it. Yeah, you could pick a playlist for your workout, but once chosen there was no way to change short of quitting the session; sure, you could have a celebrity pop on and congratulate you for some milestone you’d accomplished, but good luck on them actually being relevant after a while. At some point in the late stages, before my refurb Nano bit the dust, I had Paula Radcliffe coming on after every single run and congratulating me for covering another 500km.
If you’re in the mood to feel super-heroic, that’s pretty awesome, I guess. Paula would hope I’m feeling great, because I’m sure doing great, and I would silently fist pump as she congratulated me for running most of the distance between Toronto and Pittsburgh. Five kilometers, one mile, six miles, it didn’t really make a difference to her — I was Pittsburgh-bound, every single afternoon.
And the celebrity cameos aren’t the only things that aren’t… you know, accurate. Quickly Google any given (and for journalistic balance, here’s this) link about the product, and you’ll see what I mean. There’s all kinds of advice on what to calibrate, how to calibrate, when to calibrate, but overall the experience seems to be that if you’re willing to use the Nike+ sensor, then you’re willing to tolerate about a 5% to 10% variance in your results. If you’re running a half-marathon, that’s anywhere up to just over a mile.
Best of all, it’s going to die pretty soon. Almost as soon as it was released, discussion started about the limited battery life, which would span roughly 1,000 miles (see my goal, above) or a year of solid use. Then the whole $50 is going to be a brick, and I’ll have to toss it out — data and all. Unless I suddenly discover a means of printing off all the accomplishments I have stored over at the Nike website, it’ll all get wiped away when I get a new Nike+ set.
And I bought a new Nano just so I could keep using it, anyway.
Why? Because the thing is, it’s nifty. If you’re one of those hardcore runners who wants to know your distance down to the meter, there are products out there for you. You can spend a couple of hundred bucks on wrist-borne computers that will track your distance from orbit, and report your footspeed relative to the surface of the earth at any given moment. The technology is freely available; the opportunity is there. Fill, as Maritimers have been known to say, your boots.
Or, I can spend just over forty bucks, plug something into my very-portable and otherwise-fine iPod, and have something to vocally encourage me as I pound out the miles. Apple and Nike managed to successfully fuse my obsession with numbers and my total reliance on music to exercise, and I’m fine with that — it might not work perfectly, but it’s good enough for the money spent. Even when the time comes for me to dump another more money into a new kit… well, I probably will, because it was so much fun using this one to begin with. I blow enough money in a year on shoes anyway.
My Nike+ has never, ever functioned properly, but it’s worked well enough for me that I’m disappointed if a female voice doesn’t come on every seven minutes and bellow the number of miles I’ve run in my ear. It wouldn’t hurt if Apple maybe tested their new hardware with the hugely-co-marketing widget they’re offering alongside their giant athletics partner, but as long I get fifty bucks’ worth of fun out of it, I’m fine.