ipod and dac?

Also, Alpine is coming out with a car stereo that will interface with an i-pod, take over it's functions, and keep it charged.

Three things have kept me from buying an iPod:

The first thing is price, iPods are VERY expensive re-packaged hard drives. A 40 gig hard drive (40.9 MAXTOR 7200 LIQUID 6E040L0) sells for $60. A 40 gig iPod sells for $499. Nice case, batteries, and some software wrapped around the hard drive, but certainly not $439 worth of value-add.

Secondly, it's been widely reported that the batteries in iPods fail (18 months seems to be the reported timeline when the batteries in an iPod give up the ghost). Since the iPod has a 12 month warranty you're out of luck. These batteries are not user replaceable and cost $100 for a fresh set.

Finally, hard drives fail. They are mechanical devices that generally speaking don't like being hauled around and subject to jostling etc.. Hard drives fail just sitting in a desktop PC. Anyone who chooses to use hard drives to store their music collection will be disappointed when the device quits. Hard drives fail, it's just a question of when.

You sure an iPod is worth the expense and hassle?

Jeffloistarca:

You make some very thoughtful points that are very much worth considering. I too, haven't gone the iPod route either for similar reasons.

The Ipod uses a very small HD, so the price comparison to the Maxtor (a larger format drive) is not valid in this case. There's only one manufacturer that makes the small drives, last I checked.

the case and software certainly is worth $400+ I think, in this land of multi-thousand dollar power cords and speaker cables - in fact taking that into account it seems a total bargain. No one does user interfaces as well as Apple. The case and final product are a piece of industrial art, like most of the stuff they have made.

Batteries are user replacable, but it voids any warranty - there's a place online that sells them. It's a risky job to replace them though. I believe Apple has made improvements to the battery situation since the 1st gen ipods came out. It would be nice if they were designed to be user-replacable, though.

Sure, HD's fail - but so do CD players, etc. Assuming you had the original CD's that were copied to the drive, you are not losing anything (except time) if the drive dies.

I dont' have an Ipod yet either, but I think it's just a matter of time. A digital output from the unit would be a great thing to have too, btw.

-Ed

just another way to look at this, a $300 15GB ipod will give you access to 300 cd's, thats easily a $4500 investment. So for anyone who likes to listen to their music when they are away from home, traveling, commuting, at the gym, beach, etc. it is easily worth another $1 per cd to have that music available to you anywhere in the palm of your hand.

I have a 2 year old original 5GB version, no hard drive or battery problems. I also use it at least 5x times more than my home stereo as I travel a lot for work and use it every day at the gym.