[Macworld.com]

Is Apple's new click-wheel iPod really a mini with greater storage capacity and battery life or a maxi that bears a click wheel? If you look under the hood, you'll discover it's a bit of both. [more]

[Nobody]

The real questions are: Will the new "Click Wheel" have numerous bugs and manufacturing flaws like the Mini, such as distorted sound (very poor jack engineering), lock-ups, disappearing music librarys (ask Kevin Rose, Tech-TV), or will it have premature battery death months after the warranty expiration? Or what new hidden problems have yet to emerge?
Granted that Apple (or their contractors in Taiwan or Korea) sometimes has brilliant concept ideas, however more often than not the follow through is less than acceptable.
I've owned some of those "less than acceptable", including an iPod (dead batt 15 months), 2 bad Mini's(returned twice) and an iBook repaired three times.
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[Chris Breen]

Let's run the list:
1. No distorted sound on my click wheel so far (but I didn't have that problem on the three minis I have either).
2. Lock-ups: Nope. Of the dozen or so iPods I have, I think I've had fewer than 5 lock ups.
3. Disappearing music libraries: With all due respect to Kevin, it's never happened to me with those same dozen or so iPods and multiple computers running various versions of iTunes.
4. Premature battery death. There's nothing premature about it. Lithium-Ion batteries can be fully charged a theoretical 500 times (you won't get that many charges -- more likely 450 is your top end). That's for ANY Li-on battery regardless of what kind of device it's in -- cell phone, computer, portable game player, music player. It's just the nature of these batteries. If you use your iPod constantly (and therefore charge it all the time) you'll get about a year and a half out of the battery.
I'm not suggesting that Apple doesn't occasionally issue a product with problems. I've had two bad 3G iPods (black screen of death) and some of the iBooks are just bad news. But given the number of Apple products that work perfectly out of the box versus those that have problems, I don't think the evidence backs up your "more often than not" claim.
Chris

[jbelkin800]

auntimac, are you one of those people that give off electrical charges - who can't wear watches? - I have three ipods including a 1G one that has about 85% of its battery life and I've been using it almost everyday for 2 years (it's my work one). I've had one lock up - I traced that to the fact I had a lot of less than :60 files and I was try to skip forwards and backwards in searching for the right :30 second file, it confused the ipod with its attempt to cache my file - other than that, thousands of hours of listening to over tens of thousands of tracks shuffled in and out - no problem. A pacemaker should work so well.

[rtdunham]

Chris Breen: This item comes from your 911 column, but I can't figure out a way to contact you directly:
you're THE MAN to sort out the present rumors from the time magazine 'gadgets' article that suggests there's more hidden in the new iPods than meets the eye, potentially significant features. I know from watching you disassemble one at macworld sf that you have the best chance of the pundits, to explore what might be hidden there, what we might look forward to. Help!
terry

[Chris Breen]

I suspect that Time is picking up on some dated news. That news is that the chip inside recent iPods responsible for playing music is also capable of displaying images and video (that chip will also allow the iPod to play .wma files). So yes, the potential is there, but potential doesn't equal reality.
Chris