This vexes me a little even though it doesn’t immediately affect me. I have no use for other Apple products. I have 13,000+ songs and 90+ GB. I “need” this many because I like diversity, and like listening to entire albums not just random crap on shuffle.
Hmm… <$250 or $850 to $950? 160 GB or 128 GB, minus included OS space? Hmm… tough decision… (price w/ no contract).
Almost none of what’s on my iPod is music. It’s mostly audio books, radio shows, podcasts - that sort of thing. And I have a system. I download stuff, load it onto the iPod, and get it off my computer’s hard drive. It can sit forever on the iPod until I feel like getting around to it. I like it that way.
While I bemoan the loss of the iPod Classic in theory… in practice, my 64 GB iPod has been in a drawer since I switched to an iPod touch (32 GB, enough for my “essential music”) and then to an iPhone (also 32 GB). I miss the days of the clickwheel/and buttons instead of a touch screen I have to look at. And yet, while I could carry both, I never actually have.
I suspect that Apple is responding to a lot of people like me in the market. If there’s not enough demand for the higher capacities, it makes sense to phase them out, even if it leaves some people stranded.
I said “viable”, not perfect. Previous versions of the iPhone maxed out at 32GB, so it couldn’t replace an iPod no matter how much you were willing to pay.
I’m sort of in the same position. Even though I love having my entire collection on my iPod, I bought a Nano because it’s small and ok to jog with. But then I just started using the Nano all the time because it’s easier to carry than the iPod.
Personally I hate Apple anyway. With their stupid pretentious bullshit stores for nerds. Why do I need to make a fucking appointment with some smug prick to do what should be a 5 minute product exchange in any other store on the planet?
Those devices don’t do well with big SD cards. They support up to 32 GB, but if you’ve got anywhere close to that amount of compressed files the library gets unacceptably slow. On the newer Clips, SanDisk doesn’t recommend more than 16 GB cards for MP3’s.
I suspect at some point soon there’ll be a flash memory based player with comparable storage to the hard drive based Classics, but they’ll probably be fairly spendy.
I’ll agree with that. I was planning on buying a baseline Macbook Air and building it into a much better machine, but Apple soldiered the SSD and RAM on. I suppose that saves a negligible amount of space, but it’s very annoying.
Still, you should look into SSDs. They’re much more durable than hard drives, which is all the more important for something like an iPod that’s moved about.
Yes, here’s 1
Got a Classic you’re willing to pull apart? Alternatively, find one on ebay or kijiji that has suffered a hdd malfunction.
ssd
Flash drive
Bigger battery
If I’d seen this a month ago I’d have gone out and bought one on the spot. Now I see the price at Amazon has shot up to $450 or more from $250 or less.
That’s one way to tell a really good discontinued product from all the dross. Most stuff, the vendors discount their remaining inventory just to get them off the shelves. The really good stuff, the price skyrockets.
I use RockBox with my Sansa Clip. It doesn’t seem to have the issues with taking forever to update its database. What I really like about the Sansa is that it just looks like an external drive, so you can actually find the files you have on there and transfer to another computer you have, you can avoid using iTunes (which I loathe), and you can store whatever else you want on there, too.
IPods are external drives too, and don’t require iTunes. You just have to turn disk mode on. In some circumstances the filenames are gibberish but the id3 tags are still there.
I love this.
Screw the Cloud.
Are you using a ginormous SD card full of songs?