iPod More Popular Than Beer?

prostoalex writes "Whenever someone says college students, the first thing that comes to mind is drinking beer, right? Wrong, says new research by Student Monitor, which claims than in 2006 73% of students it surveyed said iPods were in, while beer drinking and Facebook.com fought for the second place with 71% of popular votes."

Bzzzzzzzzzt!

Summary is incorrect. First line of story clues you in:

Move over Bud. [emph mine]

Story is about american students. Summary headline should read:

Apple: iPod more popular than flavourless brown fizzy drinks.

(I'll leave the facebook==beer popularity jokes to others:)

Re:Bzzzzzzzzzt!

As it goes...

American beer is like sex in a canoe, its fucking close to water.

Re:Bzzzzzzzzzt!

...its fucking close to water

There are plenty of very good (and close mainstream, pun intended)
beers from the US these days. Avery, New Belgium, and Victory breweries
are some of my favorites. (beware the Golden Monkey)

Of course, most of those brew English or Belgium style,
so props to the originating countries for showing the way.
I just wish I could convert more of my 'NASCAR' type friends
from 'Bud' and the 'Silver Bullet'. When they come over and peruse
my fridge full of tasty, bottled treats they give a blank look
and whine: but where is the Coors?

*shudder*

Re:Bzzzzzzzzzt!

I am a PhD student, so I'm perhaps not representative, but I find this 'research' slightly hard to believe. In the last three years, I have bought exactly one iPod. Over the same time, I have bought several hundred beers. Taking this week as a fairly representative example, I have bought two beers, and no iPods at all.

Re:Bzzzzzzzzzt!

I'm sorry, you seem to be under the impression college students drink for taste.

Re:Bzzzzzzzzzt!

And iPod's also suck. Overrated electronic devices, becoming a fad because of people's lack of knowledge regarding mp3 download services/devices. I don't approve of corperations[sic] luring stray unknowledgable[sic] people in, and locking them down with their shit proprietary formats of mp4, and m4a.

Or they have become popular because they are damn convenient. I have plenty of knowledge of MP3 players, and the software for most of them sucks balls. The next option is using an MP3 player that you can totally ignore the software, but I have a very large music collection and prefer the automation of transferring songs. For cataloging music iTunes is an excellent program, and having an MP3 player that links up to it is a great bonus. Now on many grounds the iPod is not the best player (in some cases far from it) but the iPod definitely isn't in the suck category.

Not just college students

It's not just college students. No, the iPod has absolutely become a phenomenon that I was thinking was perhaps restricted to college students and those of us Apple geeks that were early adopters (I had an iTunes music server made out of an old Powerbook as soon as they released iTunes). However, my thinking has essentially been completely corrected with all the travel I was doing over the past year giving talks and such. On every trip, I saw white earbuds connected to iPods and just last week on the Washington, D.C. metro subway, I counted twenty people in my car alone coming back from the Pentagon who were using iPods of various types, three people with Powerbooks/MacBook Pros and two people with brand new Macbooks. It was amazing and given the performance of the stock market over the past couple of weeks, made me feel much better about the shares of AAPL that I purchased.

Go away, you're not 21

For one thing, beer is never going to be popular with more than 37 percent of law-abiding college students in the United States, where the legal age for possessing an alcoholic beverage is somewhere in the junior year. With an iPod, on the other hand, any college student in the United States can rip CDs and buy DRM'd tracks from iTMS.

Re:Go away, you're not 21

For one thing, beer is never going to be popular with more than 37 percent of law-abiding college students in the United States[...]

      Pfft. Those two guys are a little creepy anyway.

Re:Go away, you're not 21

law-abiding college students

Individually, I understand every word in that snippet.

But together.... just not parsing.

Good lord, have you been to college?

For one thing, beer is never going to be popular with more than 37 percent of law-abiding college students in the United States, where the legal age for possessing an alcoholic beverage is somewhere in the junior year. With an iPod, on the other hand, any college student in the United States can rip CDs and buy DRM'd tracks from iTMS.

I was at one of those schools in a state where the drinking age was 21. What I can tell you is it's easier to get beer than a nice glass of ice water!

People are used to easily availiable beer starting in high school!

Stupid kids.

No matter how many songs you listen to, she's still gonna be ugly and talk to much.

In other news...

...sandwiches are still more popular than laptops.

A new phrase.

"Free as in iPod"?!? I think not.

Re:Nice

beer always rises again when drinking excessive quanitys..

Tomarrows headline:

iPod better than sex; survey of virgins shows.

Oh crap!

I didn't realize this was a binary choice!

I just bought an iPod! THE HUMANITY! Beer, I miss thee already!

(heh)

Age factor?

TFA doesn't mention the age groups of students that were surveyed.

Barring underage drinking, it is more likely than not that students over 18 years would vote for beer, while iPod's would appeal to the younger agegroup as well. Infact early teenagers seem to be the target of their marketing campaigns, and people who're more likely to vote iPod over alcoholic beverages.

Given the fact that most students in the country comprise of the 0-18 age-group, and a minority in the 19 and over age group, the results aren't surprising, and infact skewed.

Statistics

The margin of error is 2.3% so they are all really tied.

Still whats better than jamming out with your iPod while surfinf Facebook and getting drunk?

I dizagrea

Bere is waaay mor popoolre tnah podis! I heave noo idia wat ur talkn abowt ociffer....seeriuslee, man.

huh?

"...beer drinking and Facebook.com fought for the second place with 71% of popular votes."

You might want to check your math, you drunk facebooking iPod dancing freaks!

Im ny day we studied in college, humming along to an 8 track! And that's the way we liked it!

Flawed Survey

Not everyone likes beer. The percentage is higher with college females. Why didn't they ask 'alcohol' instead of 'beer'?

Re:Flawed Survey

  Because they have an agenda.

SB

Budweiser beats Barry White everytime

You can take the one listening to the 6th song on your slow jams playlist, I'll take a women on her 6th beer.
Once again the education system fails us.

Why, those young punks....

I remember when it took my two roommates and me to scrape together $6 to get a pitcher of cheap beer. If there was a $20 between us, we were drunk and proud of ... something...

These kids nowadays with their $250 iPods... Sheesh! :-)

Something seems fishy...

I question the validity of this survey. Wouldn't beer-drinking college students necessarily be underrepresented in this type of poll? It's totally not a statistically representative sample of college students if they asked these questions during daylight hours, and even worse, if they asked them before noon.

Hey, nerds drink too!

Hey, don't bash nerdy university students. I'm an undergraduate currently studying for a research masters level course on neural networks with a beer in my hand (11:25 am) and no iPod or whatever the hell a facebook is in sight. Mind you, I do live in Australia, which might explain my priorities a little.

Probably...

They were probably drunk when they took the poll...