I got a free iPod last year from the company I work for, and for the most part I love it except for the hideous usability and design problems.

I love the way it looks, feels, sounds and the ease of playing music with it. However…

1) You can’t turn it off. Holding down Play turns off the screen, but the iPod itself will still die and require a recharge after that. How horrifyingly mediocre.

2) You can’t replace the battery. You have to send the iPod into Apple and pay $99 for them to [I’ve heard] throw yours away and send you a new model. Some third party services offer to replace the battery for only $30, but if you want to do it yourself, it’s entirely at your own risk.

3) You can’t use iTunes to copy files to your hard drive. It doesn’t care whether or not the files have DRM or are even MP4. You can copy them through Windows Explorer, but the iTunes software destroys all filename and directory structure conventions so it’s impossible to tell songs apart.

4) The iTunes software itself is hideously buggy. It plays and shares music well over a network, but when I was trying to set up my iPod on my new laptop, the second I plugged it in, it asked me [essentially] if I wanted to reformat my iPod and copy all the music from my hard drive to my iPod.

Of course I didn’t, so I clicked ‘No’ and it then proceeded to happily reformat my iPod and copy all the music from my hard drive to my iPod, without telling me. No “Reformatting” dialog, no confirmation, no progress bar… I just saw my iPod’s music library disappear instantly. Poof. $50-odd of music I’d bought specifically for my iPod was now gone forever, as the hard drive I’d backed it all up on had died the week before, hence the new laptop.

It’s actually funny how much people love the iPod despite how horrifyingly crippled it is. I’ve tried explaining these problems to pro-Apple folk that come up with endless excuses as to why things have to be this way, and have even claimed that all these problems are my fault and that I’m stupid. :)

How dare I expect an expensive music-playing portable electronic hard drive to have a replaceable battery, the ability to turn it off, the ability to copy files to and from it and expect it not to randomly delete my entire music library even when I expressly told it not to? I must be out of my damn mind!

I’m smarter than average and have used PCs since I was a child, and yet this crap still happened to me. I’m not careless. How’s an average consumer supposed to deal with this?

After having such horrible experiences with it, I decided to uninstall iTunes and do everything possible to hack the living hell out of my iPod to try to make it a usable device out of it. That goes along with my basic philosophy of “If it can’t exist on my terms, it can go right to hell.”

Fortunately, I found a Winamp plugin that allows you to copy files to and from your iPod and fixes the filenames. It works great so far, and seems to be an extremely satisfactory way to solve all the iPod’s associated software problems. It’s almost enough to make the iPod operate like it should!

All that said, I still absolutely love using it. I can’t deny that it does do a handful of things very, very well. It’s just horrifyingly bad at everything else, and I find it absolutely remarkable that the market was willing to bear it anyway.