I got a new iPod Classic today! It's the 80 GB silver model.
It's amazing how these things have advanced. It's half the thickness of my 1st gen iPod, holds 16 times as much music, and has well over twice the battery life.
Incidentally, my 1st gen iPod is still working perfectly -- on its original Li-poly battery. I got into a conversation about this today with somebody who refuses to buy an iPod because the batteries aren't user-changeable. He swore and be damned that an iPod battery couldn't last more than two years. Mine is six years old and still working fine.
When I pressed him on the subject, he insisted that any Li-ion cell would be effectively dead -- reduced to 20% capacity -- after five years at the latest, even if it was never used. Well. . . My iPod was rated for 12 hours when it was new, and I recently took it stargazing and played it for six hours straight. I don't know how much longer it would have run, that was as long as I could stay up!
Why has mine held up so well? As many of us have recently learned, Li-ion cells degrade with usage and age, and the aging is accelerated by high temperatures and high state-of-charge. My iPod hasn't been heavily used , it hasn't been cycled hundreds of times, and it has spent long periods of time in storage at a low charge level. Under those conditions an unusually long service life is exactly what we should expect.
The old iPod was rated for 12 hours when new. The new iPod Classic is rated for 30 hours of music playback per charge. That means it will experience even fewer charge-and-discharge cycles in ordinary usage, so it should lose capacity even slower. It also has allowance for even more capacity loss; after the new one is degraded 50% it'll still have more capacity than the old one did when new.
You might wonder, if the old iPod was still working well then why did I get a new one? I can put my entire music collection on the new one, which is rather convenient. The reduced weight and thickness should make it a bit more comfortable to carry on my longer walks. The thing that really prompted me, though, is that I expect to be getting a new car sometimes in the near future which comes with an iPod interface. The old iPod doesn't have dock connector, so it wouldn't have worked with that.
It's amazing how these things have advanced. It's half the thickness of my 1st gen iPod, holds 16 times as much music, and has well over twice the battery life.
Incidentally, my 1st gen iPod is still working perfectly -- on its original Li-poly battery. I got into a conversation about this today with somebody who refuses to buy an iPod because the batteries aren't user-changeable. He swore and be damned that an iPod battery couldn't last more than two years. Mine is six years old and still working fine.
When I pressed him on the subject, he insisted that any Li-ion cell would be effectively dead -- reduced to 20% capacity -- after five years at the latest, even if it was never used. Well. . . My iPod was rated for 12 hours when it was new, and I recently took it stargazing and played it for six hours straight. I don't know how much longer it would have run, that was as long as I could stay up!
Why has mine held up so well? As many of us have recently learned, Li-ion cells degrade with usage and age, and the aging is accelerated by high temperatures and high state-of-charge. My iPod hasn't been heavily used , it hasn't been cycled hundreds of times, and it has spent long periods of time in storage at a low charge level. Under those conditions an unusually long service life is exactly what we should expect.
The old iPod was rated for 12 hours when new. The new iPod Classic is rated for 30 hours of music playback per charge. That means it will experience even fewer charge-and-discharge cycles in ordinary usage, so it should lose capacity even slower. It also has allowance for even more capacity loss; after the new one is degraded 50% it'll still have more capacity than the old one did when new.
You might wonder, if the old iPod was still working well then why did I get a new one? I can put my entire music collection on the new one, which is rather convenient. The reduced weight and thickness should make it a bit more comfortable to carry on my longer walks. The thing that really prompted me, though, is that I expect to be getting a new car sometimes in the near future which comes with an iPod interface. The old iPod doesn't have dock connector, so it wouldn't have worked with that.
