As a reward to myself for all of my recent hard work, I decided to get myself one of the new 5th generation iPods today to replace my existing one. I’ve had my existing one for 2-1/2 years now and there is nothing particularly wrong with it. It is a 3rd generation, 20 GB iPod and it’s battery life is down to about 9 hours, but it is otherwise fine. I just wanted one of the new iPods with the video capabilities and especially the longer battery life (20 hours for music and 6-1/2 hours for video).
In addition, I bought myself a small, external Firewire/USB 2.0 100 GB hard disk. My thinking is that with my new 80 GB iPod, I’d consolidate my audio and video music libraries on the external disk, thus freeing up dozens of GB of disk space on my iMac and iBook. I wasn’t sure how difficult it would be to do this, but I should know better by now. Nothing is difficult on a Mac. A quick search led me to this article on consolidating music libraries and the step-by-step instructions worked perfectly. (The videos on my iBook are still copying over as I write this, but I’m transferring them over the network so I imagine it will take a little while.)
A few things I noted about today’s experience:
- The friendly sales person at the Apple Store (at Pentagon City) was able to check out my purchases without me having to get in line. She had a wireless handheld device through which she ran my credit card and told me that I would receive the receipt in email. Indeed, when I got home, I had the receipt in my inbox.
- The 80 GB iPods no longer come with docks. I’ll have to get a universal dock separately, but I can do that tomorrow.
- Their ear-buds no longer come with the black covers. I think I still have a few spare ones sitting around, but I was hoping to get some new ones
Naturally, I bought the AppleCare protection for the new iPod as well so that when the battery finally runs down, I can get it replaced cheaply. (I also made sure to enroll it online as soon as I got home so that I don’t forget.)
This is my third iPod since early 2003. I have always been impressed with the design and ease-of-use of these devices, and I’m looking forward to playing around with the new one. I gave my first iPod to jen_ashlock when I got the second two and a half years ago. I have offered to give my second iPod to another friend and I’m waiting to see if he wants it. Two years between upgrades might seem like a short time, but I get a lot of mileage out of these things. More on just how much another time.
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