Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[miles]

Apparently the little cube charger they give you is already a converter (it goes from wall current to firewire) so all you need is new set of prongs to fit into that thing. See here.

Thanks for the confirmation.  I checked out the ipod lounge but didn't find much.  I didn't have time to look through a lot of it though.

[jough]

Yeah, I just charge mine through the USB port on my laptop, and get an international charger for it.  That way I can power my iPod and Palm PDA at the same time.

But if you want to power it through the wall, see the Apple store for the fastest and easiest way to order an international charger with a number of changeable plugs.

[miles]

It's an old thread and I'm always the one to resurrect it, but I am anyway because recently I learned that the rules of Forum etiquette demand that I do so instead of starting a new thread.  Also because this thread has been a great resource to me for iPod related issues, and with Christmas coming up, some new members may like to post with questions and review old information.

It's almost been a year since I purchased mine, and I was contacted by Apple recently with an offer to extend the care package for another year.  It's $59, and I'm thinking it might be a good deal because I've heard that if you use it a lot, the iPod's battery is expected to stop holding charge within two years anyway, and sending it in the Apple to replace it costs $100.  I've seen third-party batteries for as little as $30, but you have to replace it yourself.  Do you guys think the extended care package is a happy medium?

I guess I could buy a new one when it dies, but who knows where I'll be financially at the time, and I don't want to live without one for too long.  Has anyone's battery died yet, and what did you do?  Buy a new one or replace the batter, and if the latter, how?  (And if the former, did you stay with iPod or get something else?)

[CortJstr]

I got mine in June '04 and the battery is down to 50% capacity. I'm just living with it right now as the car charges it while I drive and if I listen at work I can plug it into the wall. I guess if I was out about the town more often I'd care more.

[jough]

I guess it's worth $59 if it covers you for two more years, since you're almost certainly going to want a battery replacement in that timeframe (even if you sell it, you'll get more for it with a new battery).

I had my 4G 40Gb iPod for about a year and sold it for $28 less than I paid for it and bought a Nano.  I'll probably sell the nano next year and get the next one, since iPods depreciate about as much as cars do, which is to say, not much.

So for me, it's not worth the extended warranty, as I'll never have one long enough to take advantage of it.  I also keep my iPods in a case all the time and am pretty careful about not breaking or scratching them.

Man, I loves me the Nano, though.  No more lag between songs, no three seconds to turn on, it's lighter, the battery lasts a long time, the small size is great.  I don't think I could go back to a hard drive based player again.  But I hope they increase the flash capacity soon, although having said that, the 4Gb is actually pretty ample as I tend to listen to the same songs/albums over and over again for a while anyway, and if I want variety, I can just sync it with my PC and get all sorts of new stuff, loaded by any kind of criteria thanks to Smart Playlists in iTunes, which I'm just starting to use more and more.

[AugustWest]

no three seconds to turn on,

Three whole seconds???  My god!  How could you possibly have stood such an inconvenience!  I mean, having to wait three whole seconds before you could engage in such a vital activity as listening to pop music...  Wow.  I don't know how you survived as long as you did.

And the weight.  Lord knows it must have been a burden to carry around both of those ounces.  Shaving another 3 grams off your load is bound to make a huge difference in the bulk we carry around.

God forbid I'd ever be separated from my Duran Duran for a single minute!

[CortJstr]

It looks like the large-capacity flash iPods are a little ways off. Samsung developed flash memory that will go up to 32"GB" and of course Apple was all over that shit. But last I heard South Korea was investigating the exlusive deal between the two companies. So it looks like 30GB iPods with no moving parts are going to be a little ways off still.

[miles]

It extends it for another year, making it two years total.  But I guess I will probably want to replace it within that timeframe from what I've heard.

That Nano is so sexy!  And when you say no lag between songs, do you mean to say that there is no gap between the tracks, or that the lag you get every few or several songs or so is gone?

When are these super flash drives supposed to come out (from Samsung)?

[jough]

With the hard-drive-based iPods there's a gap every few tracks as the hard drive spins up, but that's not really irksome.

What's annoying is if you're looking at which track is playing (say, while you're shuffling 6,700 tracks) and keep skipping to the next one.  Skip past five or six tracks (the amount that will fit in its RAM buffer) and then wait, sometimes for 5-10 seconds, as it loads the next few shuffled tracks into its buffer.  Then you skip past THEM, and again - wait.  Then sometimes, just for kicks, it locks up and you have to do a soft reset on it (hold up and the center button together for a few seconds).  Then wait up to a minute while it "reboots."

Ugh.  So frustrating.  And sometimes it would lock up so badly that the only thing I could do was put it away and not listen to music for the rest of my walk.  This would happen of course when I was at the farthest point from home.

And dude, it's not a matter of a few grams - it's the difference between having to keep hiking your pantaloons back up because the brick in your pocket is of too much gravity, and putting the thing in your shirt pocket and then sometimes forgetting that it's in there because it's so light.  The difference in size and weight is most evident when you're holding them in your hands and can feel the difference.

And I'm one of those jaded fucks who thinks that the Nano could stand to be a little shorter in length.  NOT SMALL ENOUGH, STEVIE.

Did anyone else see that SNL bit from a few weeks ago where Jobs kept introducing smaller iPods?  I can post the clip somewhere if you want to see it.  Funny stuff (albeit ripping off that iPod Flea commercial that was going around the internet over the summer).

[CortJstr]

When are these super flash drives supposed to come out (from Samsung)?

Samsung announced the existence of the new NAND chips about 3 months ago. They managed to make chips of 16Gb (gigabits) each and are able to group them together to max capacity of 32GB (gigabytes), IIRC.

Then S. Korea started investigating Samsung for business practices (I believe they've since had to pay fines there and in the US) part of which was selling flash to Apple at half market value. I can only assume that this will push back development of 10+GB flash iPods.

[pmcd9]

My new I-Pod is frikkin' awesome, but I do have a complaint.  I wish when you went to shuffle mode it wouldn't start from scratch everytime.  It should pick up from where you left off the last time you were on shuffle.  For that matter, any song you play at any other time should also be added to the already played list when you are in the shuffle mode.  This wouldn't be such a problem except my I-Pod seems to have developed it's own list of favorites.  There are literally thousands of songs it has yet to play even once, yet it has played 'Cities on Flame with Rock 'n Roll' 9 times now.  I like that song, but not that much.  It also reallly likes 'It's a Long Way to the Top if You Want To Rock and Roll' a whole bunch (6 plays). Wait, I just realized that there may be a theme developing here.  Hold on, let me check something...

Very interesting, 'Rock and Roll Hoochie Coo' 4 plays, 'Rock Candy' 3 plays, 'Rock and a Hard Place' 2 plays, Rock and Roll Pussy 2 plays, 'Rock and Roll Music' (Chuck Berry) 2 plays, 'Rock and Roll Music' (The Beatles) 2 plays, 'Rock the Nation' 1 play, 'So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star' 1 play, THE ENTIRE ROCK ACTION ALBUM!!!  I don't know what to make of this data.

~Paul

[CortJstr]

I have no hard data to back this up but I think it might use the date as the seed for the shuffle. Because I've noticed that it will take a song I haven't heard in 3 months then play it every day for like 2 weeks. And it seems to do this with a group of songs for a week or two then suddenly start doing it with another group of songs.

To combat this I've started waiting a couple days before I sync it so that it has a chance to play 2 or 3 hundred songs without any repeats.

[jough]

Paul, do you have a new iPod that plays video?  If so, there's a setting to actually make the shuffle *less* random so that it'll skip lower rated songs or at least put them lower down on the list.

On my nano it will pick up from wherever you left off while you were shuffling if you turn off the iPod.  Yours probably does that too as long as you don't leave shuffle mode.  I do agree that it should return where you left off in the shuffle until you somehow forced it to start over and shuffle again - that would be neat.

Otherwise, isn't it awesome?  I know that everyone will have some minor quibbles and there are some things that could be better (like not returning to the now playing screen after ten seconds if I'm trying to read the lyrics) but all in all I love my iPod.

[Limmo]

The iPod is a wonderful thing.  I've filled 38 of the 40 GB, so now I'm starting to enter Sophie's Choice territory with adding new music to it. 

I can have most of my record collection in my car and on my computer.  Life is good.

[CortJstr]

Also Paul, those play counts might not be accurate. The iPod only remembers the most recently time a song was played. So if you were to listen to Hurt 5 times today then sync the playcount in iTunes will only go up by one.

Also, iTunes has a "how random is the shuffle" slider, does anybody know if this setting translates over to (3G) iPods? Maybe I need to run the updater again.