A Moment of Silence for my iPod

Especially when Replay Music does a much better job, and splits the files into MP3s and even recognizes and tags them with really good accuracy. The iPod not supporting music services was a deal breaker for me. I have been extremely happy with the variety of choice I have with the Zen Vision:M and the various music services.

I love my Ipod, hunny just purchased there Applecare protection plan with up to 2 additional years of service coverage for me .. i had a funny thing happen to mine 3 months ago i had left my ipod on a service counter where i worked lol and called when i got home to see if it was still laying there on the counter, my co worker said yes and held onto it for me and said she would drop it by my house after her shift LOL well.. she couldn't find my house and i had forgot to tell her my phone number, so the next day i called her house and she told me she would swing it by my house on her way in, at this time i am at work so she left my ipod in between my screen door and front door now mind you i live in Alaska and it was like 30 below zero.. i came home on my break and saw it between my doors i turned the frigging ipod on(smacks head) like an ass then shut it off.. 30 min later it wouldn't turn on again lol.. i had to wait 4 days for the ipod to dry out, i was so upset and thought i lost it forever

Y'know, when something is referred to as "The Rolls-Royce of ____," I tend to think not of the reliability, but the expense. It's true that that expression came from the fact that Rolls has insanely efficient customer service, but have you ever priced an alternator, for example, for a Silver Shadow? Here's a remanufactured alternator for a '75 Silver Shadow that lists for $324.75, plus a $250 core charge. That's ludicrious.

I have a friend who used to have an '81 Mercedes-Benz 300 series, and she lost her keys one time... the dealer charged her $300 to make a new key. Insane.

Anyway, that's how I feel about iPods, and, really, Apple products in general, even though I do have a friend that has an iMac and OS X really is a sweet ride.

Sorry.

P2

If you know the date you called and the rep you spoke to, write a nasty letter to Apple corporate and they'll probably give you a free one.

I did this last year when a manager of a branch of a major corporation told me 1.)It was her employee's fault that my account was screwed up and 2.)They weren't going to fix the problem unless I paid them X amount of money (which was twice the amount I would've had to pay if they hadn't mucked it up). I sent a letter to corporate hq and three days later they made that branch pick up the tab.

Both of those are foreign cars, so price for parts is always a pain in the ass. I'm not familiar with keymaking, but wouldn't getting a new key for a lock with no duplicate require doing something like making a mold of the lock? Possibly even taking the ignition lock apart? Sounds difficult. Supply and demand

I've had more players than I can count and you might as well throw a dart at a board to try to figure which will be reliable. Found no guaranteed indicator of which will be a quality product. Only two have really lasted (I won't mention them, 'cause the next guy around the corner will certainly have a horror story of any product). It's pretty typical of this kind of product, unfortunately.

Are the iRiver MP3 players any good? My only experience with an MP3 player is the Sony Walkman Mini-Disk player that I've had for almost 2 years.

Yeah, because laughing at the guy didn't piss *him* off or anything.

The warranty is not a lifelong pact of friendship, it's a business deal where you pay extra to get covered for a certain period, and that's it.

The iPod is a complex and state-of-the-art piece of machinery; it's a computer that can do sound and video playback, on a supernaturally bright LCD screen, with a teeny-tiny little hard drive, that has to survive being banged around and carried in pockets (or in my case, around my neck). Failures are going to happen, eventually. Look up "entropy".

Maintenance on any machinery costs money, sometimes as much as half the original cost every year. You expect cars to cost a certain amount in maintenance (mid-range cars can get by with as little as 10% annual maintenance costs, but cheap cars and expensive cars can both be 25-100% annual). You expect desktop computers to cost a certain amount in maintenance. This may well be your first encounter with personal electronics that you don't just throw out when they die, but they follow the same laws as any other gadget. No matter how much you polish it, it doesn't make the internals work any better.

As I see it, there's two alternatives: 1) Buy a new iPod. If, *for you*, it's not worth $200 to fix a $400 iPod, buy a cheap one. Different people will value their existing iPod higher than that, and consider maintenance an acceptable cost. But, damn, the iPod is a wonderful piece of machinery. Worth every penny.

2) Buy one of the crappy alternatives. They all suck. At best, they have inferior ripoff versions of the iPod interface, and in most cases they're unusable. None of them are usable with iTunes, and iTunes blows away every other music library/playlist system. They vaguely-comparable ones are only slightly less expensive than the iPod, and are no more reliable. You can buy a cheap piece-of-crap one for almost nothing, but you'll have to throw it away in a year.

Now see I have an Ipod Nano I got it back in January, I LOVE my Ipod, I hate Itunes with an unholy passion, cause in order to add new music to the library with minimal fuss I have to delete the whole library then re-add my music folder, and it's not very intuitive, it took me til last week to figure out how to make a playlist I could just drag and drop stuff into rather than the infuriating locked "smart" playlist.

Um, what?

File, Add to Library will add things to the library without deleting anything. If you try managing your mp3 dirs outside of iTunes, you'll have problems, but don't do that.

As for making a non-smart playlist, you can either hit the big + button (which in Mac interfaces always creates something in the tab it's under, and it has a tooltip "Create a playlist", or use File, New Playlist. Both are pretty obvious, I'd think.

Still, if you're having problems, there's iTunes: the Missing Manual.