On My New iPod

Sun, November 4, 2007 - 5:39 PM PST

I had been thinking about buying a new iPod for a few years now - I've had one of the 30GB second generation ones for probably five years, but it's been starting to flake out on me lately and the battery life has gone down to practically nothing. For a while it wasn't that big of a deal, I just charged it as soon as I got to work or got home, but lately it's been "locking up" where it won't accept any input for a few minutes and then start working again - so I can't turn it off or change songs or volume during that time. Well when the latest generation of Nanos came out, I decided that I would get one.

So today I figured would be the day and I went to Best Buy and got a black 8GB one. I considered briefly whether I should put my money towards an iPhone or an iPod Touch but decided against both because I have to carry around a Blackberry for work and it's a good enough smart-phone that I couldn't justify paying more and having another big appliance in my pocket. Yes, the size of the Nano was definitely a plus - when I got my old iPod, it was sexy and cool, but well, the world caught up and it seems awfully clunky now.

Anyways, I figured that I'd have to finally upgrade my iBook to Mac OS X v10.4.x in order to use it and I was right. A self-admitted Apple fanboy coworker offered to help me upgrade it as he has a 10.4 DVD, but I don't have a DVD drive in the iBook, so it'll involve some sort of targeted install via FireWire. I don't know - but I'm sure it'll work, because we're both smart, and these are Macs we're working with here... Right? Anyways, yeah, I'll likely be putting an upgraded copy of Tiger on my old iBook, but considering that Apple doesn't open the specs so that I can talk to it from Linux or Solaris and I did just give them $200 for the iPod, I can justify it.

However that's just the software but, and I didn't figure this part out yet, I'm not sure if my new iPod supports Firewire or not. If not, it would mean that my iBook's lack of USB 2.0 might give me a severe speed bottleneck. That'll suck. I'm just hoping that my Firewire cable from the old iPod will be enough and that there's nothing USB specific about the new hardware. I guess we'll see. I've been fighting off the urge to buy a Mac Mini - maybe I'll have a new reason to now.