Also, you'll have to find a friend with a PC any time you want to do a firmware upgrade on your Karma (the upgrades only work on USB2).

When the next firmware for the Karma comes out, I am going to try and load it via VirtualPC on the Mac, since VirtualPC can capture a USB device to pass on to the slave OS.

An iPod is equally friendly on a MacOS or Windows machine now that iTunes exists on both sides. While the Karma supports more operating systems via Java to sync music, the iPod wins for having 2 operating systems that can do a dock and auto-sync.

Personally for me, the big thing was the ability to open Jemplode and just sync my empeg and Karma. There still seems to be a few issues with this (issues I will troubleshoot a bit more here soon), but a portable empeg beats out the iPod in my book.