Old and busted/New hotness
No, what you see above is not the result of an evil exercise in cloning first generation iPod nanos. I do indeed have two. Here's why.
Last week after I arrived home from work, I dropped my iPod. It landed butter-side-down on the asphalt driveway with a dull, unassuming thud. Immediate inspection revealed no damage to the exterior, but when I turned it on, only the bottm left quadrant of the screen was working. I had broken my iPod.
This was my first MP3 player, bought in the summer of 2006 for the 20-minute bike ride to and from work. Sure, it's only got a gigabyte of storage, but that has always been enough for me. Even as newer models came (and went), I stuck firm to a resolution that I would not upgrade until my iPod itself would no longer do what it was designed to do: play music.
A broken screen did stop my iPod from playing music, incidentally, and at first I thought that was the extent of the damage. Although this was inconvenient--I could no longer see how much of the battery remained, for instance, and selecting songs became an art instead of a science--it still…