stripethree

It’s happened before, I write something nice about new Apple products only to have ones I own fail in response. It’s nearly happening again, not two weeks after discussing Apple’s new laptops. Both my iPod Mini and my G4 Cube are one the way out, fading fast. Both have had a touch time of late as the iPod’s battery had long since seen it’s better days, with the player only working when it’s plugged into a power source. This isn’t all that bad, since I mostly use it in my car, where it’s powered. Lately, however, syncing the iPod has been a challenge. The iPod seems to struggle with communicating with my laptop often necessitating a dance of unplugging, replugging, shutting down iTunes, starting iTunes to get the iPod to sync properly. I could replace the battery and go ahead and replace the hard drive, as that might be why it’s sluggish to respond to syncing, but that cost will be me more than half way to a new iPod that will basically be better in everyway.

This past weekend while trying to load up some stuff on the Cube for a BBQ, it took a dive, a belly flop to be exact. It no longer recognizes the new or old hard drive throwing input/output errors and refusing to start in anything other than single user mode. A new battery, which supposedly is a known point of failure, didn’t help anything. I found an old CD that came with the Cube that provided a hardware diagnosis, but it came back with everything looking rosy. I know better. I’m not sure what is wrong, and I’m really not that interested in finding out because it will probably be more money than it’s worth. A decent motherboard upgrade, if that is what is failing, will be a few hundred dollars along with a few hundred more to get the RAM to support it. If it’s cabling or something else internal it will likely be expensive and a pain in the ass to fix.

So what now? Really, I can survive without both items, but do I want to? The iPod still works just fine when plugged in so as long as I don’t mind listening to the same music on it, all’s well (for now, that is). I would probably go for a Nano if it came down to a new iPod because I still want something compact. The coolness factor of the Touch is certainly high, but that’s not enough to justify spending twice as much money. Sixteen gigs of space is plenty for my uses and I’m not interested in using a lot of the video functionality since no iPod offers the battery life necessary to get me through the flights I most commonly take. I’d have to play around with the Touch to see how well the WiFi works and if I’d be interested in making use of the other available applications.

I will miss the functionality the Cube has provided and unlike the iPod, there’s no functionality in the meantime. It’s a paperweight as I write this. The external hard drive I have hanging off my Airport Extreme can support some of that functionality but the temptation to pick up a Mac Mini has never been stronger. However entry point for that solution is $600. The refurbished and used markets aren’t going to be a lot of help as even the Power PC Minis are fetching good coin. It also doesn’t help that rumors keep recurring that the Mini is nearing it’s EOL (End of Life, as in discontinued, gone, kaput). I hope that is not the case.

My plan for now is to wait. First to decide how much I want to spend and on what and second, to see what new things may surface at MacWorld in January.