I walked into my local Apple "boutique" the other day, seduced by endless ribbons of white plastic and chrome.
I bought my 40Gb iPOD there a few months ago - the first Apple product I ever purchased after 20 odd years of buying virtually everything else.
Maybe it's just my "Windows guilt" but I'm not comfortable around those black t-shirt folks.
In any event I went to browse but also bring up a few items about my iPOD that I wasn't happy with, such as:
Scratches - the iPOD gets scratched very quickly and easily. This causes initial panic but I've found that it does eventually level off to a generally scuffed patina. I bought some iPOD cleaner and that has helped a bit (stuff works great on plastic swatch faces as well). iCleaner comes with two levels of scratch remover. The heavy duty one requires you to put on a rubber glove (snap!) as the product claims that the goo is a skin irritant. I did not test how irritating it was and just took their word for it and used the glove. The next level is gentler and is squeezed from a little bottle. They even include a cool green terry cloth!
Pauses and skips - every dozen songs or so I will hit the "next" button in the iPOD and it will freeze for 5 seconds or so. It then skips to the following track. Aargh! I had this happen to me at the Apple store and I showed to one of the black t-shirt Apple guys there. "Oh yeah, happens to me as well."
General lock ups - I'll press the center button to shift to a different mode and althoigh there is a "click" sound, nothing happens. Ugh.
Sync - not as fast as I'd expect, perhaps because iTunes running on a PC is very very slow
Battery - the battery is VERY slow to recharge, much slower than advertised.
All of these things tend to take the shine off an otherwise well thought out product. The massive storage of this type of player really changes the game. But for what Apple charges I would expect these items to be fixed.
The iPOD Lounge is good place to browse iPOD information without the Apple hype.
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