Celebrating my wife’s birthday a little early, we went to the Apple Store got an 4GB iPod Mini (made in China, I’m sorry 
), which seemed to be the best value for what we wanted in the series. The Shuffle didn’t offer enough control, and the regular and U2 iPods were too expensive.
After installing the iTunes software on her laptop, we plugged the iPod in the USB port so that it could charge. It took us a while to figure out how to copy music from CD to the iPod, a two-step process that I suppose should have been intuitive. It wasn’t. We tried right-clicking on the songs in the CD or dragging them to the iPod icon, to no avail. When we double-clicked on a song on the CD, it offer to sell us that song from iTunes! The Help file told us to Import them, which we did. You can only import a song by clicking on it and then finding the Import button in the upper-right corner of the screen, which is visually distant from the song titles. When we imported the song, we had to find it in the Library section of the iTunes software. Even though it was ripped and in the library, the copy didn’t occur until we left iTunes and came back. I didn’t see a Sync button. Too much Palm and Windows experience for me, I guess.
So the songs are now on the iPod Mini, and it sounds good. I’m still not sure if iTunes expected us to rip the CD first and then plug in the iPod. A How-To would have been nice, but I’m sure someone thought since the product was made by Apple that it would be naturally intuitive. The initial confusion over with, I’m sure by the end of the week my wife will have that thing full of Elvis, John Denver, U2, Erasure, Vince Gill, and others.
