My iPod quit working last week so I got a new one. I'm now on my third one in six years. Now I'm wondering if they have a lifetime of about 3 years. My first one died of a broken FireWire socket after three years, the second of a hard drive failure after three years.

I don't listen to music a lot on the iPod, it's mainly for the 6 or 7 podcasts I routinely follow. So it's not a case of missing the music. Still, I guess it wasn't all that bad, I bought it as a refurb from the Apple store, and it gets used a lot, both while I'm driving and when I'm walking various places around the city.

It's replacement is a nice shiny iPod Nano. I calculated the thing could hold pretty close to a month's worth of podcasts if I got a bit behind. It's nice not having to worry about a hard drive going out. The Nano is wonderfully small and light, and has a much improved interface over the 3rd gen iPod I had before.

I use an iPod because of the tight integration with the iTunes store (although I haven't purchased many things from the actual store). I can set iTunes u to automatically download the podcasts I'm interested in and auto load onto the iPod when I plug it in once in a while. I’m not aware of any other MP3 player that can do this so easily.