I showed up late to the iPod party. I figured I wouldn’t be able to use it at work, and I can play music from my computer at home, or the CD player in the car. There didn’t seem to be any real need for another expensive way to get MP3s into my head. Then my co-workers got louder, or I got less tolerant of background noise, and my CD player jammed. So a year and a half ago I bought a 2 Gb iPod Nano, which has started feeling a bit constricting of late.

So I bought Alex’s 80 Gb 5.5th generation iPod (AKA, “Video iPod”) off of him last week, because it was cheaper than buying a refurb 5th gen from Apple, and much cheaper than buying one of the new iPod classics from Apple. Once I got done peeling the screen protectors off it, because I hate my electronics and I want them to suffer, and fixing the tags on all my songs in iTunes, I threw everything on there. And then the sheer scale of this thing started to sink in.

First of all, I’m not retarded. I know that 80 gigs isn’t a whole lot of space. I routinely deal with databases that are probably bigger than that, and I’ve generated text files almost that size  before. You’d be hard-pressed to fit 10 uncompressed DVDs in 80 gigs, to say nothing of HD playback. It’s not infinite.

Which made it even a little more strange when I looked at what fits on this iPod. When Alex  gave it to me, it still had a lot of his music on it - something like 20 gigs. And some video. Like the entire series runs of The Boondocks, Harvey Birdman, Venture Brothers, and The Tick.

Add to that my entire music collection, which is about 30 gigs, and I still have 20 gigs free. Which is enough for every song Becki has, with room to spare. I could seriously back up my entire file server on it. Music, video, 5,000+ high-res photographs, the code/images for about five different web sites, and all the other random goodies on GBS.

It’s a lot of space, is what I’m saying. The fact that Apple released a 160 Gb version speaks for the relative runty-ness of my file collection.

Anyway, so far I like the thing. The screen is a lot bigger, obviously, and brighter than the Nano, it holds 40 times as much, and the battery lasts longer (though I haven’t had it long enough to know exactly how much longer).

The downside is that the UI seems to hitch for half a second sometimes, presumably because the hard drive needs to spin up. Which brings me to the other problem, which is that it has moving parts, and I have a chronic case of the dropsies. So I’m keeping the Nano around as a backup for when I break this stupid thing.