Quote:
Originally Posted by BlueSkyJaunte
My 120GB iPod just died. No warning, no unusual circumstances. It was freshly charged and playing away in my car during the trip to the pizza place, and on the way home it wouldn't connect. Fiddled with it when we got home and it's 100% bricked. Won't charge, won't respond to any button presses, nothing (yes, I checked the hold switch).
Apple in their infinite wisdom has discontinued this thing--NOS ones are commanding huge prices.
So what else is there out there that (1) uses the iPod interface (either the new or the old connector), (2) holds at least 100GB, and (3) costs less than $400?
I think I know the answer: nothing.
F*ck Apple.
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Sounds to me like yours may have eaten the motherboard, or a connection popped out inside. If the battery was dead, it'd still respond on charge; if the hold button was locked "on", it'd still respond to being plugged in. If the drive was dead, you'd get a big exclamation mark symbol...
You'd still be able to get into the menus, without the battery or a drive connected.
I dislike the Classic for so many reasons. I have several motherboards that went insane and won't do anything sensible at all - and a couple that died completely. The DAC is also noticeably lower quality than the device used in the previous model (iPod video).
The iPod video (5.5 generation onwards, best to pick the 60GB or 80GB model, which have a larger buffer than the models which originally came with smaller drives) will take a 240GB Toshiba MK2431GAH drive. Goes right in....
Those drives are (still) expensive at around $200. About what they cost back in the day. You could convert the smaller video iPods too, but you'd need to splash out an extra $5 for a 60/80GB back cover to accomodate the larger drive. Oh, and I think the battery is bigger too.
iPods upgraded like this work great; I converted two of them about 5-6 years ago. Amazing to be able to put your entire music collection in your pocket..
But nowadays, a 256GB SSD that'll fit in the iPod is $155 - cheaper than the Tosh. Makes no sense to use the spinning drive, because SSD will be faster, certainly more resilient if you drop it - and probably out-last spinning disk regardless of how often you (re)write the songs.
So start with a functional iPod video with a trashed hard drive and/or battery - these used to be pretty cheap. Replace HDD with an SSD, replace battery while you're in there. Done.
I actually use my iPods less and less all the time.
Google Play Music increased their song limit to 50,000 (from 20,000) a few months ago. I use my phone in the car over bluetooth - which seems to work better for this purpose than it ever did for headsets.
For the gym, I use a SanDisk Zip Clip; fill a 32GB SDHC card with music and pop it in.
Both the Zip and the SDHC card are cheap enough that if you lose either (or both) it's disposable. And 32GB of music is a fairly respectable amount of music (think "best of" albums for all your favorite bands, instead of your entire collection). Oh, and the thing is tiny.
I tried several cheap MP3 players before arriving at the Zip - with either my Grado SR 80's or my Shure SE215's, I simply can't tell the difference between the Video and the Zip (whereas I could hear the difference between the Classic and the Video - googled it looking for a fix and found confirmation/a bunch of Apple fans whinging about the Classic's sound quality).
In fact, I bought 2 Zip Clips; on long flights, the battery only lasts about 8-9 hours and the Clip doesn't pull enough juice from my smart battery pack for it to register that there's anything there - it just switches off again...