My four iPods

I have recently replaced my original 20 GB iPod Photo with an iPod nano*. I got the Photo back in the summer of 2005 and have been very pleased with the iPod experience as a whole. There has rarely been a day that I have not used it. When I first got it, it was before the podcast revolution. I loaded it up with most of my music. I had the poor hard drive maxed out.

I set up a play list that would allow me to randomly listen to every song on my machine before listening to any of them twice. When I was not hankering to listen to something specific, I loaded up that play list and enjoyed the random goodness. I made it through 20 GB of music 4 times. Then podcasts came along.

I had been reading about podcasts, but had not really understood them. This was still before Apple had official podcast support within iTunes. I downloaded a few shows and dropped them onto my iPod. One of the first shows I listened to was TWiT. My fascination with the show was mainly because of the personalities involved. There were fewer than 10 shows at the time. I went back and got all the previous episodes.

Since then I hardly ever listen to music. I subscribe to 80+ podcasts these days. If it weren’t for some weird requirement of the nano, I would not have any files on it that weren’t podcasts. For some reason, the nano will not show you any songs or files on your machine if you don’t have at least one normal song loaded.

In the intervening time between my iPod Photo and nano, I have had two first generation shuffles*. The first one just stopped being recognized by the computer. I took it to a local Apple service center along with the receipt. They replaced it for free, but I only had a couple of weeks left on the shuffle warranty. I suspected that the shuffle died due to my ability to sweat soak anything around me. When I got the replacement shuffle, I also got a water proof case for it. Within a couple of months it died of the same fate. Even with the Otterbox case case I kept it in, it still had rust stains at the base of the USB connector.

I still used the Photo as my main player during all of this. I have probably run 1500+ miles in the last 2 years carrying the Photo.

But the Photo has finally gotten to where it is only holding a charge for 20 minutes sometimes, and sometimes less. I just purchased a new battery for it today and am eagerly awaiting to see if that was the whole problem or if it is more serious. I have to wait a couple of weeks for the battery to arrive.

I have had the nano only about a month. I have a waterproof OtterBox case for it as well. I don’t know how people strap these things on their arms and not sweat them to death. I can’t risk that.

*Why does Apple not capitalize the names of these products? Idiotic.

5 thoughts on “My four iPods”

  1. I have gone through a variety of MP3 players, starting with the NIKE PSA Play which was a 64MB armband player… it was very cool and could play about 13 songs, enough for a tempo run… then moving along, I now have a PNY 1GB that I use solely for music. I recently purchased a refurb 4GB Nano (3rd Gen) that I REALLY like. As much as I didn’t want to go with the Big Brother Software, I love the fact that iTunes syncs the iPOd for me and moves and add podcasts for me, something I used to do manually.
    Now, I can listen to my podcasts in the car because it’s 1000x easier to pause the iPOd then it was to turn on and off the other MP3 players!

  2. I started with an iPod and tried a few other devices along the way. Even though the iPod goes against most of the things I strive for in my computing (I use Linux and most all my software is open source even on the Mac and Windows machines in the house), Apple does the whole MP3 player right. iTunes is evil. It does bad things, but the ability to plug my iPod in and never have to drag files from one place to another is just glorious. I subscribe to podcasts and magically they are on my iPod when I want to listen to something.

    I do have a smart playlist set up that gives me podcasts that have never been heard and deletes them once they have been listened to. So anything in my playlist is new material.

    Apple does the iPod experience right. Now we just need iTunes for Linux so I can use my computer instead of my wife’s for synching.

  3. Hey –
    Thanks for the post! The OtterBox Armor Series case for your nano will keep you device safe and dry from sweat and water. If you are worried about extra heat from the larger Armor Series case, you could strap on the Defender Series case for your nano and try that; less bulk, less heat.
    – OtterBox

  4. I have looked at the Defender case, but I am not sure it is what I want. I recently did a sweat rate test and found that I sweat 96 oz. per hour. That is like slowly dripping 3 quarts of water on my iPod per hour. I am sticking with the Armor series for the moment.

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