Friday, August 22, 2008

Rotten Apple

So, the last mp3 player I had was a Creative MuVo Micro, with a whopping 1 GB of memory (a lot for when I got it). I think I had it for about 6 years, and over that time, I had to update the firmware a couple of times (about 2 minutes with a USB cable). No, I couldn't watch movies on it, but it worked, and worked, and worked.

Contrast that with my iPod Classic: I just took it in to the shop today. It crashed and I couldn't do anything on my PC to make it better: couldn't restore it through iTunes, couldn't reformat the disk... nothing. Last time this happened, the guy plugged it in to one of the Macs in the Apple shop and it reformatted okay. This time, no go.

So, I've had it for 8 months, it's gone down twice, and this time it's beyond repair. Back to Apple, and theory is that they will send me a new one. That's okay until we get to January '09, when my warranty runs out.

So, I love the memory. The battery life is quite good. I've enjoyed watching Survivor in the plan on my way to Munich and home again each week. It's cool to be able to have a few of my favorite pictures with me wherever I go, too. And now that I've figured out things like using Apple lossless to encode the music and doing some gain reduction on my mp3's to keep them from distorting when I use the iPod eq to bump the bass up, the sound is pretty good as well.

But if the thing only works for 6 months at a time, it's a pretty high price to pay for what I got. Here's hoping I just got a lemon the first time and the next one is a little better...

4 comments:

troyhead said...

It's sad, but I think the iPod is one of the few things in life where it is worth it to buy the extended warranty. If you use it a lot, you can be quite sure that within 3 years it is going to crap out or that the battery won't hold a charge.

As much is that is bad, it's also good that you can have the latest iPod 3 years after purchasing your first one (which will probably have many more features) all for the price of a replacement battery. And if you purchase that warranty through a place like Future Shop, they give you the new one directly, instead of waiting for Apple to get one back to you.

I know someone who bought a 3rd gen. iPod and used it extensively. It was replaced under warranty with a 4th gen. iPod, and then again with a 5th gen. All from the original purchase and original warranty.

Again, that looks good and bad. But with electronics being so competitive on features and price, I don't expect any other MP3 player will be any more reliable. There are always tons of reports of faulty iPods, but that's because there are millions of them out there. In general, Apple seems to take responsibility for problems with their hardware, and they provide extensive support and updates to fix common problems.

I hope yours gets fixed soon!

Unknown said...

Flash memory players = no moving parts to break

Ipods = spinning hard drives = lots to break.

Anonymous said...

I concur with Nathan. I have an ipod shuffle and an ipod Nano and neither of them do anything silly. But I don't watch videos and I don't work them half as hard as you do. :)

Anonymous said...

Nothing to do with this post (though I am deeply sorry about your bad luck) but yesterday was Wednesday *cough* We seem to have forgotten some traditions...