Wednesday, January 24, 2007
My iPod: I hate it because I love it
I had a long day yesterday, involving ten hours of meetings sandwiched between 135-mile drives around greater Philadelphia. Five hours of driving under such conditions without listening to newsy podcasts and music on my iPod motivated me to get up this morning and methodically work through all helpful instructions on the Apple support page again. I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes and again "restored" my iPod (which the reinstalled iTunes was finally able to detect), but it still reports the iPod as "corrupted" (one is forced to wonder what "restore to factory settings" means under these circumstances). So the 30GB video iPod I bought on August 12, 2006 at no small expense is beyond recovery by me. This is frustrating, because it crapped out spontaneously. I hadn't dropped it or abused it in any way. It just melted down. So now my remaining practical option is to drive to one of the various Apple stores in New Jersey. The problem is, for me that involves a minimum of 90 minutes of driving and a visit to a mall, both of which seem like an inordinantly high price to pay.
In a comment to my last post, there was some debate over whether an iPod is a "MUST" (as co-blogger Cardinalpark avers). I'm fairly sure that he and I measure the necessities of life differently, but there is definitely something psychological about an iPod, at least if you get into the habit of using most of its functionality. In case it isn't obvious, I really miss the damned thing.
The problem is that Apple extracts a very high price for the product's addictive qualities. Not only is its price high, but it takes a huge amount of care and feeding. One commenter said that he just treats his iPod like "any other disk drive," and defrags it once a month. I'm sure that's a good idea, but only fairly conscientious people bother to defrag their computers that often. I only have so much conscientiousness to spread around, and I hadn't allocated any to my iPod.
Now here's the hard part. Through the generosity of others, I actually have a new, unopened iPod in reserve. I can toss the one I have and install the new one, and presumably then I will be up and running. But what do I do when this one crashes in a couple of months as my experience tells me it will? Do I really want to go through more hours of rage and frustration plugging through the "FAQs" at Apple support? Sad to say, I think cold turkey is preferable. Apart from wishing desperately that these iPod posts would stop, what would you guys do?
9 Comments:
By 
Catchy Pseudonym, at
Wed Jan 24, 09:34:00 AM:
I have an iPod and a mini iPod. The only problem I ever had was when my three-year-old son poured water onto my 20-gig iPod. I also have a Powerbook. They have never given me trouble. In fact most people I know with iPods haven't had trouble. So that being said, I'd be real surprised if your back-up crapped out too unless Apple's making them cheaply these days. I'd say go for the new iPod and get your old one fixed in the meantime.
By Grumpy Old Man, at
Wed Jan 24, 09:38:00 AM:
Mine works fine, so long as I remember to drag it into the trash before removing it (an old Apple annoyance).
Trapped in a car, I can listen to Dostoyevsky and Glenn & Helen. Not a bad deal.
By 
, at
Wed Jan 24, 10:19:00 AM:
Contrary to much popular belief, iPods actually don't require any preventative maintenance or care at all. It's nice to update the software on them once in a while, since that usually makes them faster and adds features, but they'll work fine with the factory code. Defragging them is actually pretty silly, I think. A fragmented hard disk is just slightly slower than normal -- it's not really any more prone to failure. Plus, the conditions of an iPod's use means that its disk likely isn't all that fragmented, and I don't even know how susceptible the iPod filesystem is to fragmentation anyway. So I would only defrag if you've got a lot of time to kill.
What happened with your, then, is probably just hard drive failure, which is typically fatal. Unfortunately, that's pretty much par for the course with any hard drive. It's a side effect of having a fin wafer-thin magnetic plates spinning at a few thousand RPM a tiny distance away from a read/write head that will destroy them on contact. The hard drive is really an archaic design which we will fortunately be rid of completely in the not so distant future. In the meantime, though, there are iPods (specifically the Nano and Shuffle) and other MP3 players that don't have hard drives. These players store songs in flash memory, which is a solid state technology and, for all intents and purposes, has no lifespan. Since solid state electronics almost never fail under anything approaching normal use, a flash-based MP3 player will be exceedingly reliable. At least, of course, you don;t have to worry about the hard drive failing again.
By , at
Wed Jan 24, 11:05:00 AM:
You sound like someone who vows never to date again after his first girlfriend breaks his heart. Those people only wind up old bitter, and rather creepy. Take the new iPod out and start syncing.
By TigerHawk, at
Wed Jan 24, 11:18:00 AM:
I admit, it's a lot like that.
By Robin, at
Wed Jan 24, 11:59:00 AM:
Get an Apple computer then you wouldn't have these issues and wouldn't need to worry about defragging it.
By , at
Wed Jan 24, 04:28:00 PM:
ok, how about you give me your video ipod, and I'll take it to the apple store near me?
By , at
Thu Jan 25, 01:49:00 PM:
Have you ever shown it to Kevin over at CompUSA in NassauPark? He's actually an Apple employee, not a store employee, and he was able to make very useful suggestions to me on another iPod problem.
By Mark in Texas, at
Fri Jan 26, 02:21:00 PM:
I don't know if moisture has anything to do with your problem, but you might want to look at this and some of the other linked solutions in the comments.
