an iPox on iPods

My third iPod in two years has clicked it's last tune. I'm getting sick of this. I pay 30-60,000 yen for a lovely wonder of portable content hardware for it to go sad-mac in under a year. I take it all the way to Shibuya, toll roads, fuel and parking, wait two hours for their smug little "Genius Bar" guys to do less than I did: plug it in, notice that it doesn't show up on iTunes, listen for a HDD whir, then blithely tell me that "the hard drive is broken" and that I'll need to buy a new one. Can they sell me a replacement drive? Nope, sorry. It's proprietary. Please by a new one.

After the second one crashed, I only bought the third because I've structured so much of my business on it and I didn't have time to completely re-tool to another player. But this other one, a mini I bought off my luddite sister and it only lasted six months (she never touched it, and I bought it well after the warenty had expired). My video iPod is on the expensive 2 year warrenty and I expect to replace it at least two times before then.

But on the way home, I was thinking about when the iPod first came out. I remember reading all about it in the tech mags, about this amazing little portable music player that uses a little hard drive to store all the music. "A HARD DRIVE DISK" I remember balking, "IN A PORTABLE DEVICE???" Hell, I don't move my PC's CPU a more than a thumb's length without shutting down. I used to be a laptop hardware tech and I know how unstable hard drive disks are. You can't expect more than about three-to-five good years out of a laptop under normal usage...how long can I expect a hard drive half the size to last bouncing aroung in my back pocket? Seems my first impression was correct. I just forgot about it in the midst of all the iHype.