I’m a big fan of the iPod. I bought my first one, a 40GB device, as an Xmas gift for myself a little over 2 years ago, and spent days loading my hundreds of CDs and putting notes on them that would let me build complex playlists (like all my happy jazz versus sad jazz, traditional bagpipe versus modern bagpipe, etc.). The playlists are my favorite part of the system—you specify the criteria you want—like songs in the jazz genre, published after 1950, with “happy” in the comment field—and any new CDs that you add automatically go into the right playlists, however many that they match the criteria for, like dynamic, self-updating mix CDs. It’s brilliant.
I used that iPod for a year and a half and had only one problem with it: after I dropped it on asphalt, it started to lock up occasionally. But I used a computer trick to reformat its drive to avoid the damaged bit of disk, and the problem went away. Then a friend, who didn’t have a lot of money, lost his during a horrible vacation with his wife to Hawaii—where it rained and flooded all week, and the airlines screwed up their flights in both directions. I picked them up at the airport during their unexpected 8 hour layover in LA, and my friend was so bummed about losing his iPod that I gave him mine—which had the happy side effect of giving me a justification for picking up a 60GB video iPod the next day. When I plugged in the new video iPod, all of my songs transferred over to the new device automatically and without a hitch (as I expected). And my friend has been using my old one ever since, without a problem.
Shortly after I bought the video iPod, I also bought a little 4GB nano, which is what I listen to all of the podcasts on. It’s fantastically tiny, and I love it. I gave that away, too, though when the 8GB nanos came out last fall (to a kid who worked at the local comic shop). Both nanos have worked without a problem—and since they have no moving parts, they’re even more durable, and the battery on the 8GB lasts freakin forever!
And the iPods got me into the Apple stores, and seeing all the cool Macs persuaded me to buy an Apple as my next home computer, and I’ve never regretted it. *So* much better than a PC…. :-) And iTunes and the iPods work on both PC and Mac, so I was able to transfer that whole music collection over to the new machine without a hitch, which I couldn’t have done if I’d had another type of player.
In short, I’m a big fan. Like any device, you’ll occasionally get a bad unit, and that’s impossible to avoid. But I know about a dozen people who’ve bought iPods, none of them have had problems, and we’re mostly picky, hyper-critical, computer programmer types. So, do with that as you will. :-)
