A rotten Apple?
My Rio Carbon began misbehaving about 6 months ago, so I decided to buy an iPod (4 gig 2nd gen nano) to try it out. Even 6 months later I'm still looking back upon my Rio Carbon days with fond memories.
I now have a player that crashes more often. The iPod often takes several attempts before the thing actually responds to my command to shut off. The iPod needs some silly proprietary cable to transfer files. I no longer have the ability to play WMAs on the thing (and I did have a few, even if most of the stuff on my iPod was in MP3 format). It's hard to find anything on the iPod that's not fully labelled - the Carbon had a "[no author]" category (amidst others) that made it easier to find things. The iPod is more ackward to copy files to and loses my filenames whereas the Rio Carbon integrated with iTunes on my Mac as well as allowing you to copy files normally to it.
The Rio wasn't perfect, but IMO the iPod is bad enough that I think that I may ditch it for another MP3 player and let my iPod die an early death.
At the same point in time I'm debating the merits of buying an iMac. According to the rumour mill now is a bad time to buy an iMac, as new models are being expected soon. I'd guess mid-June at WWDC - a major Apple conference.
Why buy an iMac? One of the key things is actually the lack of something - noise! To quote Silent PC Review:
It remains one of the quietest off-the-shelf systems it is possible to buy
Yet, at the same time I find myself somewhat worried about Apple's quality control (and I'm not sure I want to ditch a 19" LCD that seems to work just fine). All of the Apple products that I've owned in the past have been just miserable as far as quality control is controlled. I've owned 3 Windows/Linux-based computers and in total I had a video card die (and some problems with secondary IDE channels). My iBook, on the other hand, had 3 major repairs - each of which would likely have cost $500 or more, if not covered by the extended warranty, as well as 3 other repairs (2 also covered under extended warranty) each of which would have cost around $200 to fix. Was this just a fluke or is this a common problem with Apple? I know that Nan also has had repeated iBook problems, requiring repairs.