silentbob

i came to the opposite conclusion. i was trying to decide between the lexus kit and the vaistech unit, and i'm gonna go with the vaistech unit. from what people said here, navigating artists with the oem kit is terrible. the vaistech unit is far from perfect, but at least you can scroll 6 at a time, and you can def select by artist.

guys, if i am missing something please let me know...

Koz

My iPod was only used in the car (Never dropped). The reason I had four was because they kept giving me replacements under warranty. Just after the warranty expired it crapped out again and would cost $100 to replace just the logic board. I bought a Scandisk MP3 player (Just $99) and had no more problems. The first time I played it, I could not believe how much better the audio quality was. It has more features, including a memory card slot. Sorry, will never buy another Apple product.

Apple = Overpriced POS

Koz

Kurtz

iTrader: (1)

Ok, just understand your case is extremely non-typical.

If Apple was giving everyone 4 ipods under warranty they'd be bankrupt by now. Instead they're virtually printing money with ipod sales and nowhere near the failure rates you suggest.


In the meantime my 160gb ipod has run flawlessly for nearly 2 years now, and nobody else makes anything with capacity even close to this.

I've got well over 100gb of music so a dinky sandisc unit (where even 2 years later they sell nothing holding even 25% as much) would've been pretty pointless for me.

andytseng

Dangit... looks like I'm gonna have to do some more research.

Since this is a question about iPod kits for the Lexus, I really don't think this is the place for a discussion about iPods vs. other mp3 players, but FWIW I've had the same iPod 40GB Classic for 5 years+. Although I did replace a crapped-out HD for a compact flash card a few months ago.

Koz

After researching, my experience with iPod is very typical. Yes reliability has gotten better but it is still not expectable, by any means. Your iPod has gone two years without problems, but that does not make them reliable. The fact is your iPod has worse sound quality then the older models because they changed the DA converter. People tend to read and believe what they want. They tend to find a way to feel good about their choices (I do this myself). I understand your need for bigger because of the size of your library but I found that the cheap dinky Sandisk sounds significantly better and I prefer quality over quantity! Also I found that I don't need to carry my whole library around. 16gb is plenty for traveling, plus you have the memory card slot (if need be).

Be open minded and just listen to the sound quality difference. This alone should make the difference. I use my iPod as a coaster to remind me that sometimes paying more does not mean it is better.

The reason I posted a little off topic is to warn other members of the mistakes I made by spending allot of money on products that support proprietary devices that because their poor quality, I not only ended up with an expensive POS MP3 player, I also have a dedicated sound systems that is now useless. In my case I purchased a $300 Bose iPod based sound system. I’m so glad I didn’t invest even more into a car controller.

Koz

Kurtz

iTrader: (1)

No offense, but I'm not likely to take advice on "sound quality" from somebody who spent money on Bose hardware... No high? No lows? it must be Bose!


My 160gb ipod sounds just great using a dock connector to the AUX input on my Mark Levinson system... and using the dock connector line out vs. the headphone jack avoids internal DAC issues.

But there's simply no actual 'research' that supports your claims on the reliability problems...

You'll find anecdotal people who complain about their individual ipod...but the nearest to a real study on failure rates I've ever seen is from 2005 and shows that apart from one specific model (40gb click wheel I think) reliability has been pretty decent (and improving over time, so the newer models would be even better, and the flash based ones significantly better than even that)... and that's from 4 years ago too.


Given ipod sales figures are massively, massively, massively higher than anybody elses it's not surprising that even if they had a nearly zero failure rate you'd still find hundreds of individuals who were in that near-zero category complaining about it on the internet.

Over 200 million ipods have been sold. If the failure rate were 0.1% that'd still be 200,000 failed ipods.

So that's a lot of failed ipods, but I'd hardly call something that is reliable 99.9% of the time to be unreliable.

Koz

No offense taken, I agree about Bose products. At the time, I had credit card points from Sharper Image and I lined up every compact speaker system they had available for the iPod (Half dozen). The Bose was the best sounding and cost me nothing. Funny the Bose never failed!

No actual research! How's this? A survey conducted by Macintouch found that out of nearly 9,000 iPods owned by more than 4,000 respondents, more than 1,400 of the players had failed. The survey concluded that the failure rate was 13.7 percent. Using your total sales, that comes to OVER 27 MILLION FAILURES!

I think that should put the iPod reliability issue to bed. The more important fact is that a cheap dinky Sandisk MP3 player sounds WAY better.

Koz

Kurtz

iTrader: (1)

Yeah, that was the one study I mentioned in my post.

It was done 4 years ago, over 2/3rds of the 'failures' didn't describe in what way it failed, and many of those that did meant 'the battery doesn't last as long as when it was new' which will be true for any device with a rechargable battery, including your $99 sandisk player....

Further many of the other failures were -actually described- as a result of dropping the thing or immersing it in water... where again a non-flash-based player of ANY brand is likely to have issues.

Even the people who did the survey realize some of the problems with the "results" and state "we can't help but wonder if this means the dead-iPod failure rate is significantly less than indicated by survey numbers"

So no, there's no real research. There's one 4 year old survey that didn't control for anything, had a non-random sample of owners, and using a sample size that is roughly .002% of ipod owners, and freely admits the actual failure rate is likely much lower than suggested by the "data"

rs/ss

good debate:-)

07SGM

I just got the Vaistech unit and installed it. It works great and the sound quality is incredible. If you already have Sat radio or plan to get it, I would link it through the CD adapter when installing it. This way you can still listen to your sat radio and your cd's.
It is def worth the money IMO

Kazabet

I'm a little confused... I ordered the OEM "LexPod" adapter with my car. When I got it. They handed me a Vaistech manual. I searched the web and I couldn't find any reference to any iPod adapter made by Lexus, only the Vaistech. Has anyone with the OEM adapter actually looked at the device, or have a manual that's branded Lexus?

Koz

Again, some people intrepid information the way they want to see it. I see this info as being pretty conclusive regardless of what caused the failures; the fact is they are failing. This survey verifies my experience, I had a total of four units and ALL of them failed. From many other posts of failures that I have read, it's pretty obvious iPods are not reliable.

Let me throw this out there; Apple, in there own survey have verified that there was a reliability issue on older models. Don't you find it funny that there has not been any other (more recent) surveys that show an improvement? There is only one logical reason why! Also some customers have tried to address the issues/failures through Apple's forums and their problems have been removed from the web site. Let me give an example;

"OK, we'll get around that coverflow problem by just ignoring it and not using it. Check.
So, I put the thing in the dock on my PC. Hours later after the first synch all is good. But then, each successive time when you put it in the dock you get into a repeating connected, synching, connected, synching, connected, syching mode, and you cannot stop it. iTunes says synching once, but then if you try to eject the thing you can't. iTunes locks up for minutes at a time.
What do I do next? I go to the Apple Support discussions. I realize that there are many, many comments about this. Hmm! So I post some questions and I make a point of saying I have bought 4 other iPods and none of them do this. They all get deleted from the discussion groups.
Then I start monitoring the discussion groups by downloading the entire website several times a day and I realize that Apple is literally deleting many, many posts about these same problems.
The message you get from them is that you are violating their guidelines which I guess means that if you complain that your product flat out doesn't work you aren't allowed on the "support group".
Then if you start to examine the discussion groups and realize that Apple has intentionally disabled many of the video functions of the previous iPod models which breaks EVERY non-Apple video device out there.
Seriously, this is the most flawed product Apple has ever produced and as a fifth time Apple iPod buyer I have to say it's the last iPod I will ever own. Apple seems to be much worse than any other company now that they have a monopoly on MP3 players.
My vote is to buy anything BUT Apple from now on because they just screwed me, and thousands of other people, over on this iPod Classic."

After my experience with this product and from seeing MANY others having the same issues I would be a FOOL if I continued to buy their product. I think that any logical person would agree.

Koz

Koz

Vaistech probably makes the adapter for Lexus.

Koz

Kurtz

iTrader: (1)

The fact is they're not. That survey, besides being hopelessly out of date, is fairly useless for drawing any conclusions... I explained why already, and even the people who DID the survey agree that the 'results' are very questionable for several of the reasons I mentioned.

"battery doesn't last as long as when new" isn't a failure, but they count it as one. And about 50% of the "failures" in their results were battery complaints... so that's half gone already.

Most of the remaining 50% were hard drive failures, and a lot of those are from people who -said- they dropped the thing. Damaging the product then it stops working isn't exactly a reliability issue is it?

And again, it's a tiny, non-random sample size.... any statistician you showed this survey to would laugh you out of the room.

What survey would that be?

Since they have their own data on warranty repairs why would they need to do a survey to see how often the units come in for repair anyway?

Now if you want a more valid, survey, I can point you here:
http://www.ipodobserver.com/ipo/arti...Apple_Laptops/

"Apple also topped the MP3 player category, where the iPod scored Average in all criteria and Better Than Average for ease of use and satisfaction with reliability."



But that doesn't agree with your personal experience with 4 out of the 200 million ipods in the world, so you're likely to dismiss it.



I understand you had issues. Nobody makes a perfect product. But you're simply wrong that the ipod is significantly less reliable than the competition, especially if discussing any models made in recent years, and they also offer significantly larger capacities than anyone else. (and a much better interface and user experience according to every survey ever done on the subject).

Now, I'm no fan of itunes, but there's PLENTY of alternatives to using itunes.

other than to update firmware my ipod has never been connected to itunes at all, and I've had no issues.

Kazabet

I'm just a noob on these forums, but shouldn't a discussion on iPod reliability be on Apple's forums? I thought this thread was about the Lexus adapter?