Appreciating the Classics

iPod Classic Packaging

Our new iPod “clas­sic” – which comes in much more com­pact pack­ag­ing than old­er iPods. The large cube box has been replaced with a much slim­mer case. Also, you don’t get a charg­ing block with it anymore.

After much debate and self-reflec­tion in our home over the past cou­ple of weeks, we decid­ed to get an 80GB iPod Clas­sic. We new that we were due for an upgrade from our old 20GB 3rd gen­er­a­tion iPod. It’s tiny mono­chro­mat­ic screen was hard to see much on. The size was­n’t too much of an issue (of course, that’s part­ly because it could­n’t dis­play video or pho­tos). We played around with the iPhone quite a lot and debat­ed get­ting an iPod Touch. There’s no deny­ing that it has a gor­geous screen and sexy interface.

How­ev­er, once we start­ed look­ing at what we actu­al­ly use an iPod for, the Clas­sic was the right choice. I lis­ten to music most­ly in my car and that slick inter­face (you have to turn it side­ways) would­n’t work in a DLO trans­pod. Fur­ther, flick­ing around music prob­a­bly isn’t a smart thing to do while dri­ving. Also, we use the iPod as a hard dri­ve to back­up pho­to & video stor­age while on vaca­tions and 16GB was­n’t going to be enough (I can aver­age as much as 500 pho­tos a day, which is about 3.5GB per day when shot in RAW).

All that being said, it also came down to a judge­ment in val­ue. I sim­ply did­n’t want to pay more for some­thing that did less of what we need from it. We don’t have the extra dough to be spend­ing on friv­o­lous fea­tures that we’ll rarely take advan­tage of (i.e. – the iPod Touch). We real­ly did con­sid­er get­ting an iPhone, which would be nice to reduce the num­ber of gad­gets (phone, Palm, cam­era, iPod, lap­top) but in the end, I think that even the mighty iPhone falls short of any one of those devices when com­pared direct­ly. It’s not as good a cam­era as Ange­la’s Canon Elph, let alone my D50. It does­n’t have the third par­ty soft­ware that Ange­la’s Palm has (nor will it ever as far as Apple is con­cerned, it seems). We have mobile phones that do a good job of sync­ing with our macs (for con­tacts, cal­en­dars, etc.). Ange­la’s iBook is great for surf­ing while not at home (though, obvi­ous­ly for only one of us at a time should be we apart). Last­ly, I’ve enu­mer­at­ed why the iPhone is not the per­fect iPod for us. Sure, the con­ve­nience of one sleek gad­get ver­sus five bulk­ly ones is allur­ing, but ulti­mate­ly not a rea­son­able option for us. At least not for the present time (I prob­a­bly will get a iPhone if a 3G net­work ver­sion is avail­able when I decide to replace my w810i).

No Music

There’s been some typ­i­cal blog/complaining about the inter­face upgrade, which I sup­pose was the most sig­nif­i­cant change between the 5G and 6G iPods. Giv­en that I was using a (seem­ing­ly ancient) 3G, I don’t miss what­ev­er they are pin­ing for, to tell the truth. The “Ken Burns effect” on the album art in the back­ground does­n’t both­er me, though I sup­pose it looks more attrac­tive with some cov­er-art more than oth­ers. Per­haps Apple could allow for users to select which art gets used? I don’t find the Cov­er Flow fea­ture to be that great on the Clas­sic, but it’s also not par­tic­u­lar­ly slug­gish, either. Some recent reports have indi­cat­ed that the sound qual­i­ty has dropped due to a change in some of the inter­nal hard­ware, but only audio­philes are like­ly to pick up on this. Frankly, if the qual­i­ty mat­ters that much, I doubt these peo­ple lis­ten to music on an iPod they down­loaded from the iTunes music store. As I stat­ed above, I lis­ten most­ly in my car on an FM mod­u­la­tor; the sound qual­i­ty is at least as good as the FM recep­tion on my stock Ford stereo so I don’t get too uptight about that sort of thing. Audio­books and pod­casts sound just great, as far as I care.

All things con­sid­ered so far, I like the iPod Clas­sic so far. The inter­face is an improve­ment in my opin­ion when com­pared to the old one. The cost to val­ue ratio is great, giv­en how great a gad­get the ori­gion­al iPod form fac­tor is after six years (which is for­ev­er in gad­get time scales).

Here’s some visu­al com­par­isons between the 3G iPod (back when they essen­tial­ly only came in white) and the cur­rent 6G iPod Clas­sic (now that none come in white):

Ch-ch-changes

Okay, so the iPhone and Touch have much larg­er screens, but this is a big jump in screen space (not to men­tion gor­geous color).

Moore's Law?

Wow, that is a slim lit­tle device. Now why could they put a hard dri­ve in the iPod Touch?

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Categorized as General

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

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