Enough with this ipod crap, what else?

Wow. You've had a run of bad luck with these. I've had my classic since they first came out and am now only having some issues with it.

 

i bought a classic from someone on this forum some time ago and it's preformed perfectly.

 

I've had great luck with Sansa Players except the Fuze +. Stay far away from that one. Otherwise I recommend them highly.

 

I've had my iPod 160gig Classic for nearly 5 years with no issues at all. I even leave it in the car when it's 90 degrees outside.

 

The Sansa players are great and inexpensive. Try Rockbox on them, and they are even better. Fiio has a new player that is on the verge of a release in North America. Google the Fiio X3 and check it out. Should be around $200, and it looks great on paper.

 

Well, on the bright side, right after I got the first "refurbished sold as new" piece of junk ipod that I paid $160 for I was walking home from work one morning and spotted a Fender guitar neck poking out of someone's garbage can. I put that sucker on ebay and got my $160 back.

 

That's the power of rock and roll!

 

Wow, $160 for a decent-condition 160GB iPod Classic is a very good price. New, they're $250; on the rare occasions they show up on Apple's refurb website, they're usually about $200.

I just gathered up all the iPods I could find around the house and shot this for posterity:



Granted, some are a little dinged and dented here and there -- one or two I bought used, so that's the way they came -- but they all still work. My biggest beef is that the batteries get drained a lot faster than I would like, and I need to look into replacing them. But... we're talking about iPods that are 6-7 years old, which is ancient history in the lifespan of consumer electronics devices.

Reliability has never been a problem for me with these iPods. In 9 years, I bought exactly one iPod that was a lemon from the word go, and the Apple Store replaced it at no charge. (That's the silver one in the lower left, from about 5 years ago.) All the others were and are fine.

 

OK THAT mystifies me. WHY would someone throw away a nice fender? That's just a sin (I believe it was the 11th commandment from the table that Moses dropped--Thou shalt not throw away Fender Guitars that are in good shape!)

 

iPod hoarder!

I eventually sold most of my older DAP's -- kept a half broken Sansa E200 that wasn't worth trying to sell, but I still use this one:



Gigabeat F40 circa 2004 or so. I eventually Rockboxed it, replaced the backplate with an F10 I acquired (reduced the thickness) and replaced the HDD with an 8GB CompactFlash card I had gotten on the cheap a few years back.

I've been debating getting a 64GB CF card for around $55 and dropping it in there -- I'm thinking it might actually work.

 

Wow! 2 whole GB! Whattya gonna do with all that space?

I've dreamed for years about an iPod-like device that could accept a 64GB or 128GB compact flash card (or the more widely-available SDHC cards). That'd be a great idea provided the user interface was as simple and reliable as the iPod, preferably something like the iPod Touch. BTW, the cheapest name-brand 64GB CF cards on the market right now are about $99, not $55. The ultra-cheap no-name cards are not reliable, in my experience.

 

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I'm debating -- I could buy one of those cheap ones and then it could drop dead in 3 months. That 8GB Gigabeat is one of my quick on-the-go devices so I just throw on a dozen albums or so that are on my recent playlists. But, on the other hand, it's not for a digital camera, it's for a DAP that will do much more reading that writing over its lifespan.

Your iPod 5.x Classics have ZIF adapters and you can actually get a ZIF to CF adapter for them - I actually have one buried in my box o' junk somewhere (the Gigabeat uses a 50 pin PATA similar to a 4G iPod Photo). I know that some people over in the Rockbox forum have replaced their iPod HDD's with CF cards and have gotten it to work. Better battery life, less concern if you drop it, and none of the pauses that we used to deal with when the drive would spin up/down. I think you can even buy a 128GB 1.8 inch SSD for it, if you wanted to go that route.

(This is all relevant for the OP, btw -- assuming he doesn't mind a little DIY of course)

 

Actually, according to the engineers I talk to at Sound Devices, there is no power savings going from a conventional 2.5" mechanical hard drive to an SSD. The power specs are almost identical (less than 10% different). Same with heat specs.

I don't dispute that the SSD would hold up better if you dropped it, and I'd expect the SSD would last longer. Still, I dream of having one of Toshiba's 320GB 1.8" drives added to an iPod Classic. That's a lotta storage. I'm still bummed-out that Apple never at least updated the Classics to 240GB, which is a no-brainer (and people have modified those for years and years).

 

Interesting. I've obviously never tried an SSD, but for this CF I'm almost certain battery life had improved after I dropped in the CF card. I wouldn't say it was a night and day difference, but noticable. But I'd expect performance to increase -- I know that with the CF performance from the PATA Toshiba HDD I used to have was definitely significant. The drive use to "hesitate" on ocassion when it was powering up and I recall my iPod 4G doing that as well. You get none of that with the CF card.

Toshiba got out of the 1.8 inch HDD business last year(?) I believe. One day you might see a 320GB 1.8 inch SSD, but that might be awhile. Still , I wouldn't toss those old iPods yet as you might end up refreshing them one day.

EDIT: How about 512GB? Read this -- http://www.tomshardware.com/news/RunCore-Pro-IV-SSD-ZIF,22391.html. ZIF interface, which means it should be iPod 5G compatible (at least from a hardware perspective). Imagine a 512GB iPod 5G classic when these things eventually drop in price?

 

Nice collection Two of the "good ones" for me - Gen. 5 video ipods, my favorite. Why not throw in some new batteries? It's not very hard. I finally gave up on iPods. I said screw it, brought my portable HD into work and copied 80 gigs of music onto my work computer. That way I dont have to always be charging and fiddling. IT dept. is none the wiser for it.

 

I've never heard of 6 month and 3 month warrantees for ipods, only 1 year. Sounds like the shop the OP uses is scamming people.

 

I think there's enough old 1.8" drives still in circulation that we can probably keep them going for awhile. I keep waiting for Steve Jobs' idle joke from about 6 or 7 years ago, where he wondered out loud whether a 1TB iPod would eventually be possible. When they can at least get to the point where they'll do a 128GB or a 256GB iPod Touch, I'll seriously consider ditching the Classics.

 

Two of these live inside cars all day, so the almost-dead batteries almost don't matter. The others will stay charged for at least 2-3 days; the newer ones last for weeks at a time with no problem.

For some reason, my black Gen 6 Classic has walked away, and was not found in time for the photo. This also doesn't show my iPhone 5, so I'm embarrassed to say I really own 10 of them. And I've also given away at least five or six old ones to friends and relatives in the last ten years.

 

Work, car, portable speakers on trips. Car and work is 75pct of my music listening. A 160 gig iPod full of 320kbp rips is a good compromise to have a huge chunk of my collection on the go.

 

Me too. I like my iPhone a lot and would love an IPod touch but the memory size doesn't make it helpful to me. I'm on my 4th iPod classic.

 

Does anyone even make a player that bothers to compete with the hard-drive based iPod?

The best player I ever owned was a 5.5th gen iPod (before they changed it to the 'classic'). Swapped in a 240 GB hard drive and installed the Rockbox firmware for .ogg and last.fm support (http://www.rockbox.org). Eventually my smartphone and its streaming ability superseded the need for a standalone ipod, but sometimes I still wish I had this thing. Also wish someone would bother to compete with Apple in this market.

 

If I win the $127 million in the Powerball later on in the week, I give you my word, that will be on my personal Top 5 priority list.

 

This darn thread has me researching CF cards and SSD's again - I really shouldn't be thinking about making a FrankenDAP, but there's something about having a large capacity DAP that is still appealing. I used to have 128GB Gigabeat S that I modded but eventually sold (the Gigabeat S had pretty crappy sound, even with Rockbox on it).

I need to stop reading this thread or it could damage my wallet!

 

Considering they now make 64GB SD cards, I don't know why it would be so hard for a manufacture to come up with a logical way to sync up 4 or 5 of these in one unit to create a high-capacity non-harddrive player. The market would be niche, but I bet they'd sell a few to the Rob Gordons of the world. Y'know, like us.

 

Quite a few manufacturers have 128GB SD cards nowadays, roughly $100 each for slow ones (more than enough for audio):



256GB SD cards also exist, but you won't want to pay for them yet -- roughly $400-$500 each at the moment: