Today my iPod died.  It is a sad day in the land of portable electronics, for my most beloved portable has bit the dust.  Today at work I put on my headphones and started my iPod, navigating to Music->Playlists.  There were none shown.  Usually there are hundreds.  So I backtracked and looked at the settings:

  The aPod
  Songs: 0
  Capacity: 9.2 GB
  Available: 3.3 MB

…hmmmmm….I thought.  That’s no good.  Where’d my music go?  So I plugged it in to my iBook after work and got the ‘ol ‘Disk scan’ icon.  Nothing new there, I see that on a monthly basis.  Except this time, after finishing I clicked the center button and it just repeated the process.  I tried again several times and could never get it to negotiate a connection.  Seems the file system’s hosed.

So, naturally, I took it apart.  It is now in four pieces hanging on my wall:

100_1684_3

…and yes, it still works.  Well, if by works I mean you can play the stupid brick-breaking game.  That’s about it.

We’ve been everywhere, that thing and I.  London trains, Austrian bunkhouses, New York subways, we’ve seen a lot together.  It has lulled me to sleep on flights home from Vegas, allowed me to steal people’s reserved seats on trains from München, and made me nod off on drives home from college. (errr, well, until I put something louder on)

But it’s time to move on.  After figuring out my finances I will decide what the next iPod will be.  Currently I’m looking at one of the newer 30GB models.  I don’t care about having video capabilities, so I may look on eBay or something for a deal.  I was feeling cramped with 10 gigs though, and it’ll be nice to not have to restart it every week when it gets hung up on a song.

It gave me almost three years of service, so I got my money’s worth.  It’ll be a shame to throw away the various accessories I picked up along the way (namely my integrated power adapter/FM transmitter) but they won’t work with any of the newer models.

Bon voyage, señor aPod!