11/11/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

After I left the office today I went over to the Apple store to see if I could get my mitts on a working iPod. A bunch of people have helped me out in this ordeal, big appreciation due there. Thanks!

I walked into the store and took a look at all the options. I was pretty underwhelmed with the classic. The new firmware is terrible. Half the screen is taken up by random album art, which is not only visually distracting, it keeping holding up the rest of the system while it spins up to load more random images. It took twice as long to even select anything, and from what I understand the only way to disable it is to not have any album art whatsoever. Also, it's not compatible with more than half my games.

The Nano looked a bit nicer, but it had its own problems in lieu of the hard drive. For starters, the accelerometer is kind of annoying, particularly it and cover flow. The nano has the option to switch off the menu art, but no option to turn off the accelerometer. I would have to put my music library on a diet to work with 16gb, not to mention podcasts or videos. It's also not compatible with some of my games.

I figured I might as well give the genius bar a shot, so I gave the guy the iPod, showed him what was going on, and he gave me some options. They had a new iPod of the same model that they would replace it with for the ¥15800, or they could give me ten percent off a new model in exchange for it. Now I had three options.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm not too good with decisions, especially expensive ones that I know I'll regret. I spent over an hour in that store, looking between the three models and making comparisons online. All three had things about them I really liked: The classic was humungous, I'd never have to worry about storage. The nano was light, and more robust. The 5g had plain vanilla firmware that didn't suck, and it worked with everything my old ipod worked with. In the end, however, I realized that only the old model didn't have anything about it I intensely disliked.

I'll hang on to this for another couple iPod generations, at least until the nanos surpass 32gb and Apple fixes its firmware. I'm happy with it.

2 comments:

mamagotcha said...

So you bought the new iPod of the same old model?

Glad to hear you're remusicated, but remember how peaceful that train station was... and turn it off once in a while so you can get that again.

Love ya!

Cordell Newmiller said...

Yeah, same old 5g 30gb video. Works beautifully!

I will! Most of the stations I use aren't like that though, just the ones out in the boonies are.

~Cordell