I bought my first iPod yesterday: an 80GB Classic (I actually got a Nano as a parting gift from Indiana University when I left for Cisco, but my wife claimed it immediately — I’ve never seen it again).
I resisted buying an iPod for a long, long time, mainly because I don’t listen to music on headphones very much. But I do listen sometimes (especially when traveling, while on planes, etc.). However, I had a better rationalization reason: Tracy and I maintain all of our music on our home iMac (several hundred CD’s — all of which we own, thankyouverymuch). I’ve kept copies of select music on my work laptop for convenience (e.g., to listen while traveling). But I keep running out of disk space on my laptop — it became annoying to balance the disk space I needed for work while maintaining a decent selection of music to cycle through. A good solution seemed to be to use an iPod to hold all of our home music and listen to it through my MBP (as a bonus, it’s a backup of all of our music). The 80GB model is more than enough to hold all of our music and seems to work well.
After buying the iPod, I spent an hour or two yesterday “cleaning up” our digital music collection — finding some missing album art, ensuring consistency of artist and album names, etc. I find myself doing this every few years, especially when moving to a new technology. Just for perspective: my digital music collection started years ago (early/mid-90’s?), using Grip and LAME/Bladeenc on Solaris to rip my CD’s to MP3s (some of the MP3’s I edited yesterday still had “Created by Grip” comments in the ID3 tags — wow).
While in the Apple store, I also played with an iPod Touch — just for the heckuvit. It’s quite a yummy device. The interface for the Calendar / To-Do stuff and adressbook stuff is classic Apple: elegant and simple.