This is the one I picked up (for 50 cents at the thrift store!):
You can only put 2gb of stuff on it, but because it takes SD cards you can fill up multiple cards and switch them out as you wish. I doesn’t really work with iTunes, but you can pull songs out of iTunes and put them in folders, and then shuffle those onto the cards, then pick folders as if they were playlists. Cheap, small, uses one AAA battery so it’s always ready to go.
Rechargeable batteries don’t last forever on any device. You can replace the batteries on most ipods with a little bit of work, you don’t need to pay Apple $250 to get it done. Plus you can still use an ipod as a plug-and-play, running it off an outlet or your car cigarette lighter, a portable version of iTunes. A bigger issue is the disc drive going bad, but that can be replaced too. I’ve done it on two ipods so far.
I think his point is that they ruined it by making it do more than one thing-- turning it into the Touch and iPhone, so now you can’t just listen to music, you will get interrupted by phone calls and/or texts, and find yourself surfing the web. That’s his opinion, but it’s valid. I don’t think there is necessarily a better generation ipod classic (the 6th gen has a better shuffle control, but the 5th gen and earlier have better sound cards, and the first three gen are easiest to open and modify.)
