My beloved iPod
...and what I don't like about it.

The most irritating "feature" is how difficult Apple makes it to recover purchased music after a hard drive crash. They could easily fix this by allowing users to download purchased media multiple times - that's how Google Video works. Another option would be to make it easy for users to copy music from the iPod to the new hard drive.

Some people might say that the solution is for users keep backups on separate hard drive (i.e. keeping a 3rd copy of the music), but that's more hazzle than most people want. Last time a hard drive crashed for me I had been out of the country for a few months and because of that I did not have a backup of my most recently purchased music. Since then I have not bought anything from the iTunes Store.

Another thing that irritates me is how the iPod displays music by Artist. Some artists' albums feature many other artists, and for these the iPod will display one line per unique combination of artists. I have for example row displaying "Jay-Z" and 19(!) rows that start with "Jay-Z Feat.". If I choose the plain "Jay-Z" option and then an album, the iPod plays the songs in the album that are "only" by Jay-Z, i.e. no featuring artist. When choosing "The Dynasty..." I get 4 songs, even though the album really contains 16. The only way I can play all songs is to go back to the top menu, display music by album and then choose this album.

This is bad user experience because many people think about their music in terms of artists, don't care much about who's featured on the different songs and don't know all album names by heart. Also, there's no easy way for me to play all my Jay-Z albums in a row.