Alas, Poor iPod


My iPod is soon to be an ex-iPod. This process is slow but inexorable. I first noticed something was wrong about a week ago. The MP3 player began to "freeze" in mid-song and only came back to life after protracted attempts to revive it. The time between such incidents are growing shorter and shorter and the efforts to fix it take longer and longer.

I am no expert but I think it is the disk drive. As you may know, most iPods store MP3 files on a miniature hard disk drive. And hard disk drives are sensitive to jolts and shakes. Given the fact that iPods are meant to be carried around and are subject to he vicissitudes of the traveling life, the device is pretty darn sturdy. Nevertheless, it is only a matter of time before the thing gets one bump too many. I think that is the case with my device. When it freezes, I can hear the disk skipping and stuttering.

I love my iPod and I am loathe to give up on it. They are also expensive and therefore hard for me to replace. But I think it is inevitable: I do not think that replacing the hard drive is either easy or cheap. I lack the skill to do it myself (assuming a replacement hard drive exists) and I suspect that I'd pay nearly as much to have it replaced by someone else as I would spend on a new player.

But I hope that it can hang on long enough for a new version of the 20 GB iPod, one that uses flash memory instead of a hard drive. I know that the iPod shuffle uses flash memory but it doesn't have enough storage space to carry all the songs I want near me at all times.

Does anyone know if Apple plans on doing this?