I'm about to purchase a 60GB iPod Video.
Normally, I'd buy a Cowon or something similar, but long story short, I don't have much money and ~$250 of the money I have for an MP3 player is on a Best Buy Store Credit. And an iPod Video is the only thing at Best Buy that would suit my needs.

Anyway, I've never been much into iPods, but I've heard some things here and there and am wondering if anyone could set me straight on these points, or tell me something else that is important. Otherwise, I'll make the purchase within the next week.

Things I've heard of that concern me:

-iPod does not play VBR MP3s, or "skipping" occurs on them.
-iPod is very fragile, one drop will break it.
-iPod's screen is known to go bad or crack.
-iPod's OS takes a huge amount of hard drive space (6GB is what I've heard).
-iPod's battery life is very poor, especially when fast-forwarding, rewinding, playing videos, viewing photos.
-Apple has poor customer service.



Thank you.

iPod is fragile but I've dropped mine far too many times and still works perfectly. Definitely get a case.
I've never had an mp3 skip and all of mine are VBR.
It doesn't take 6 gig, that might be the gooney way they figure disk space but even that is too high.
I think the battery life could be longer. Hitting the hard drive, skipping around, lots of lossless files and videos wears it out. I don't notice photos doing that.
Apple has poor customer service?
I've owned Mac's and PC for years. Apples customer service is superb. When people have a complaint with it it stands out because its so rare.

-I got my 5th Gen 60GB very soon after they were released and encoded with LAME 3.97b1 at "-V2 --vbr new". Absolutely zero skipping.
-Don't know about breakage as I've never dropped it or my previous 3rd gen 30GB. Like any other electronics equipment, it'll sustain damage depending on what it's dropped and how high. Protect it and be careful.
-Screen is still clear as day one.
-Don't have any info on OS disk usage.
-With -V2 encoded material, I get around 16+ hours with skipping tracks, scrolling to other artists/albums and backlight set to 5 seconds.
-Never had to deal with Apple CS, so I can't give any info.

Overall, I really like my 60GB. I don't use it for any videos and mainly use it for the car and business travel. Suits those purposes just fine. I have an Agent 18 hard case for the iPod and the case takes all the scratches/scuffs. Not a mark on the iPod yet. Some people will detract from it due to the lack of Ogg support, but recent tests bore out Apple AAC doing darned good, so I consider it a null point.

The 5th gen iPod's do not suffer from the VBR skip issue. As far as I know, that is limited to the iPod Mini's and (I think?) the Nano's.

The OS definitely doesn't take 6 GB.

Apple tech support is one of (if not the) highest rated out there.

The 6GB OS would have been quite a trick on the 5GB Ipods

Also, theres always Rockbox if you don't like Apple's OS (or just want Ogg/Flac).

will doing so void iPod's warrenty?

Possibly, but I haven't checked myself, but using the ipod updater will apparently restore the device to its original state.

About the size of the OS, there is a 100mb or so hidden partition on my ipod's drive that appears to contain the actual OS. Whether all of it is used I cannot say.

When I installed rockbox, the process seems to be; extract the sectors from the hidden partition, extract parts of the 'firmware' from that, build a modified firmware and then write it back.

The thing I like about rockbox is that it doesn't replace the existing firmware, ie. you can dual boot your ipod

i have bought a nano, and pretty happy with it. It's pretty cool, has tons of add ons. You have the rockbox project for nanos, wich is a plus. Customer service has been great. I droped it many times, no problems, and the screen has been great so far. Hoppe it helps.

PS: you title is agains HA policies, especifically TOS#6. You should have writen something like: "Evaluating iPods: quality concerns", or something more descriptive.

-Not the Videos, just the shuffle AFAIK. Mine works fine.
-Not sure, haven't dropped it yet
-It can sure get scratched easily, but can be buffed shiny again with some brasso and a microfibre cloth.
-iPod's OS? I don't even know what you mean. iTunes takes about 33MB, and QuickTime 66MB. Most people need QuickTime anyhow.
-Battery life is pretty darn good unless you're watching movies, then you get about 2 hours of playback. Note that this is with my 30GB and the 60GB has better battery life.
-Haven't dealt with customer service.

- The video iPod dones't have any skipping issues. However iTunes and iPod's do have problems with truncation of some VBR mp3 files, including songs encoded with LAME.
- iPod isn't fragile at all. My daughter has been battering her iPod mini for a year and I'm amazed to see that it is still working! It looks absolutely terrible with scratches and dents all over from dropping it and having it hanging around the neck allong with her keys. However it just keeps rocking.
- The screen isn't fragile either, but do scratch easily. I would recommend buying the white iPod as the scratches are less visible or go get one of the thousands of different cases available.
- Although the available hard disk space is not 60 GB it is close.
- The battery performance of my 60 GB iPod is great and latest an entire trip from Hong Kong to Europe. However the battery performance of the 30 Gb isn't as good and watching video drains the battery really quickly. After a feature length movie you have to look for a power outlet.
- Don't know about Apples CS. However they are rated the best amongst PC manufacturers customer services. Apple Discussion Forum is a great ressource for solving problems.

On another note. The video iPod do have a problem of skipping entire songs due to delays in retrieving the selected songs. This can be experienced when using the menus to locate a song. When you select the song the display is updated and it takes some time before the iPod begins playing the song. (Due to the time involved in retrieving the song from the harddisk) For some songs, particular lengthy MP3 files, this takes too long and the iPod times out and skip to the next song instead. This may even happen with songs bought from iTMS. The cure is to click reverse twice to get to the song that you wanted. However it's a real nuisance and I hope Apple will soon release a software update that fixes the problem.

Just to add to the ever growing comments:
1. This is a slight problem with iPod nanos, 1G/2G iPod minis, and 3G/4G/Photo iPods. This problem is very small in that less than 5% of my entire 6000+ song library was affected by the skipping. Apple has since resolved the issue with 5G iPods. You can effectively encode your music to any Lame VBR option without worrying about skipping.

2. I wouldn't say that the iPod is more fragile than other devices, but it can scratch pretty easily (just like the Sony PSP or pretty much any other electronic device that has a front plastic cover). I bet you $5.00 that if you dropped an iRiver onto concrete that the 5G iPod will perform the same. Do yourself a favor and spend $35.00 for a case. I recomend iSkin's eVo3 as it provides all around good protection.

3. I haven't seen anything about the screen going bad. I did see a lot of reports about the iPod nano's screen cracking. Apple has since resolved the issue with future iPod nanos. Most of those cases were false though as people were putting them in their pockets and sitting down, throwing their keys in their pockets, or pushing the nano up against their wallets. This is not an issue with the 5G iPod.

4. Again, I don't know where you heard this one from. The iPods firmware takes up less than 100MB on the hard drive. Now, just because you might order a 60GB iPod doesn't mean you are going to get 60GB of storage. You will get along the lines of 57GB of storage due to formatting, firmware, and hardware manufacturer issues. ALL of these issues affect every hard drive based DAP on the market.

5. Part of the problem with iPods is that the screen backlight uses a lot of battery power. Now, if you were to just hold the fast foreward button down, you would probably get around 3 hours of battery life due to the constantly spinning hard drive and blacklight not turning off. You can still fast foreward through music and the battery life won't drastically decrease. You should still easily get over 15 hours of battery life when fast forewarding. From my experience, I was able to squeeze around 3.7 hours of battery life when watching movies. This is comparable to the Creative Zen Vision M as it can get 4 hours when viewing movies. Just remember that videos in the mpeg-4 AVC (h.264) format will require more processing power than videos in the standard mpeg-4 (h.263) format.

6. This is hit and miss just like any other tech support for other companies. Originally, Apple's support was based out of America and you could get a knowledgable person or you could get a snob. Apple has sence moved their iPod tech support (can't comment on the other support) to India. Again, it is hit or miss. You could get someone who is very knowledgable and will fix your problem or you could get someone with a thick accent and who has no idea what they are doing. Your best bet is to take a device to a Genius Bar inside of an Apple store. They can give you instant results there. For example, if your iPod is defective and you get support over the phone, then you will have to ship your iPod to Apple and wait for them to ship you a refurbished model. This could take 4-8 weeks depending on the speed of things. If you take a defective iPod into a Apple store, they will instantly give you a refurbished iPod on the spot without any waiting. Don't be alarmed by the refurbished thought. Reburbished units come with new hard drives, screens, batteries, or any other problematic area.

As to skipping problems with LAME -V 2 VBR, I have experienced exactly none on both my iPod Shuffle and 15GB 3G iPod. I have a mix of AAC and MP3 VBR files, about 15,000 in my Library.

If it does happen, it is extremely rare.

Entirely false. What this really is is the powers of two vs. powers of ten thing again.

-A 60 GB hard drive has 60,000,000,000 bytes.
-60 billion / 1024^3 = 55.8793 GiB. Which shows up as 55.8 GB on your computer, since it's using powers of 2 measurements.

The iPod OS actually lives in a hidden partition that's only 32 MB in size. The iPod database files can be quite large themselves, but no more than 64 MB or so, depending on what you have loaded into the iPod. So at best, it's under 100 MB for the iPod software.

I noticed that with the 1.1 firmware on my 60gig 5G, even w/ no songs on my iPod there was 200 megs being used, 55.6gb of 55.8gb free. Even when I did a restore and wiped it clean, same thing

Updated to 1.1.1 and now it shows all 55.8 gigs free when it's empty

Not sure what that was all about

In which case the iPod Nano must have no space for music!


-iPod does not play VBR MP3s, or "skipping" occurs on them.
Some people have reported problems. I have never had this problem

-iPod is very fragile, one drop will break it.

It possibly will but I've dropped mine many times and it has some scratches which don't bother me at all.

-iPod's screen is known to go bad or crack.
The Nanos have had accusations of this however my iPod is rather old now and has been around the globe a few times with me and has never "gone bad" or "cracked" even when cranked up to 11.

-iPod's OS takes a huge amount of hard drive space (6GB is what I've heard).

See above

-iPod's battery life is very poor, especially when fast-forwarding, rewinding, playing videos, viewing photos.

Not the best battery life although devices with better battery life are usually bigger.

-Apple has poor customer service.

Never had to use it so couldn't comment. I used iTMS support and they were very good.

Someone on a different board actually reported that Apple will take Rockboxed Ipods. Even if they didn't you don't actually modify the firmware of the Ipod. Instead you're installing software on the hard disk, much like installing an OS on a PC. So worst case, you could just format the Ipod and then Rockbox is completely gone.

thank you all, I have purchased my 60GB iPod and it's great!