Apple iPod Classic (80GB, silver)

Pros: graphics updated, menu logic makes good sense

Cons: laggy dial, hard drive skips(?!), same sound quality

Summary: I'm sending my silver 80gb ipod classic back to Apple and here's why. I'm comparing this to my 3g 60gb ipod. The improvements in the ipod classic come at an unacceptable cost in terms of speed. At first, I thought the touchdial was broken because of its uneven response to my input. Then I realized that the software was just catching up to the sensory input. The nice graphics in the classic are enough of a drain on the dynamic memory that scrolling becomes way laggy. I find myself concentrating really hard to make sure the song I want to select is the one that actually gets selected. Graphics are nice and surprisingly crisp. The lag is surprisingly annoying. They may fix this in an update, but I'm not risking $250 on that. The calibration of the touchdial is really not great either. I find that I have to press and drag for a relatively long time to scroll up just one song.

Oh, and the sound quality out of the earbuds still really really stinks compared to other players out there. The player has millisecond breaks within songs for no reason. My 3G had those qualities too, so I don't mark the classic down too much for those issues.