My old faithful MP3 player's built-in, nonreplaceable li-ion battery finally died after 5 or 6 years.  I was surprised to find that there's basically no competition out there against the iPod Classic (at least, no competition for people who just need a basic MP3 player which holds a ton of music).  So I bought an iPod Classic 160GB which arrived the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

Overall, it works pretty well.  There are several issues, though, which are quite annoying and which make me question the entire "Apple stuff just works" paradigm.

iTunes - no useful log of sync issues

iTunes will helpfully tell me that 66 of my tracks can't be synced to my iPod because they can't be found.  It will even list these tracks in a dialog box for me.  The problem is that it doesn't let me save this list or even copy it for future reference.  For anything more than 2 or 3 songs (which you can feasibly write down or remember), this dialog box is completely useless.

iTunes - no folder monitoring

iTunes can't monitor my Music folder for changes.  Seriously, Apple, this is 2009, and every other music player on the planet can do this.  Is it so hard for you to believe that I might obtain music via methods other than the iTunes store or ripping CDs with iTunes?  (I am a devotee of the Amazon MP3 store, for example.)

Crashes while syncing

I have synced my iPod probably eight or ten times now in total.  Two of those have resulted in my computer completely crashing; once to a gray screen which required me to press Reset and once to a black screen from which Windows automatically restarted.  Obviously, this is a huge issue; I lose everything I have open (usually, many applications) and risk corrupting both my hard disc drives and my iPod.

I'm using 64-bit Windows 7 and the latest version of iTunes 9.  I'm sure I'm not the only one using this combination.

iPod skips songs

I only noticed this with one of my albums, but I'd bet it happens with a few others I haven't yet listened to as well.  My iPod will consistently skip several songs when I try to play them.  It happens with specific songs from one album.  I tried restoring the iPod, which didn't work; the only solution was to re-rip the CD (using iTunes, of course).  iTunes could play these files, as could my old MP3 player and any other music player software I've ever used.  Really, Apple?

iPod has no FM radio

I knew this going in, but it would really be nice to have, and it's not rocket science. Still, since I knew this going in I can't really hold it against Apple.

iPod has no custom EQ

I did expect the iPod to let me create custom equalizer profiles.  I was disappointed to find that the only EQ the iPod provides are some preset profiles.  Apple really does adhere to their "you get what we think you should have and NOTHING more" philosophy, don't they?

And that's basically it.

There are some other, smaller things, but those are my main points.  All in all, I have to say that as a new Apple customer I have not been very impressed at all.

(This said, the iPod's interface does work pretty nicely.  That's one thing Apple seems to do well.)