As I was visiting the Apple store with my roommate because his iPod died, I found out two very disturbing things (at least from a geek standpoint) that will keep me from ever buying an iPod. Well, on top of having to use iTunes (which sucks something fierce) and dealing with the inability to use the iPod as a direct drive, but anyways.
My roommate's battery wouldn't hold a charge any more so he went in to have it replaced. Turns out that it's actually a software problem. The firmware can very easily be corrupted by things as simple as unplugging your iPod before a transfer finishes, a power fluctuation, or uploading corrupt files. Why would any of those things affect the firmware? Because it's in main memory! It's not stored on a separate, protected chip like every other portable device uses!
On top of that, I found out that the shuffle function keeps the hard drive constantly spinning. Why? Because it doesn't use the 20 MB buffer when in shuffle mode. Talk about lazy programming. It's simple to have the shuffle algorithm pick out the current song and then the next few in line and shuttle them to the buffer and continue to refill the buffer with the next new song once the current one is done playing.
iPods are definitely ridiculous and will never buy one. I'll stick by my RCA Lyra 40 GB until it dies and then I'll probably get one of the upcoming Microsoft MP3 players or something else non-Apple.
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