Do One Thing

2021-03-05

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I own a Sansa Clip Zip music player, on which I've installed a custom firmware called Rockbox. Whenever I drive somewhere, and I drive quite often, I almost always have music or downloaded podcasts playing from the player.

I've always preferred having a separate, dedicated device for playing music. Over the years I've used a myriad of devices, from cassette players to an iPod Touch to a modded PlayStation Portable to a knockoff Chinese retro game emulator with a tiny Linux kernel ported to it. The Clip Zip is by far my favorite device for the purpose, and even though the device reached EOL many years ago, I recently bought a spare player to have at the ready when this one bites the dust.

A core tenet of UNIX philosophy is that each program should strive to do one thing and do it well. This philosophy seems to have been lost in modern consumer electronics--today every device is designed to do everything by itself. That saddens and frustrates me. My experience is that the more functions a device or service is intended to have, the less effectively it can perform any of those functions. Smartphones and social media have only served to strengthen this conclusion.

I find it especially frustrating when I want to purchase a device or subscribe to a service that fills a certain niche, and I find that the ninety-five percent of the device or service's function overlaps with things I already own or use. Of course this vast functionality also comes with a vast price tag. I would much rather pay less for a device that does only one thing than pay more for a device that does several redundant things.

Unfortunately, it seems the only way to fight the trend these days is to buy older devices that were designed to be independent and have only one primary function. Many of these devices are slow, insecure, or hard to find, but that's the price of preference. I'm not looking forward to how expensive a third Clip Zip will be when my spare breaks.

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[Last updated: 2021-10-28]