3 iPods in 3 years

I love my iPod. I love listening to it on the subway. I love listening to it at the gym. I love rocking out to it after an evil 2-hour meeting as I walk around downtown New York looking for something for lunch that doesn't suck. The interface, the design, the features - all just great. Only problem is, they keep dying on me. Usually just around the 12 month point. When the warranty expires...

My first iPod died after 10 months and within warranty. I shipped it back to Apple and they quickly sent me a new one. It's funny that this is the one they replaced because it's final death was hastened by me (no one told me that you can't go running with the hard drive based models strapped to your arm!) and was probably hard drive related. But it had several other things wrong with it - lines of dead pixels across the screen, a tendency to act possessed by randomly pausing itself or turning down the volume - so I don't feel guilty about them replacing it.

My second iPod - the Apple provided replacement - was a refurbished model that also only lasted about 10 months, even without me strapping it to my body while exercising. This one died slowly, first freezing mid-use and not unfreezing until plugged into a charger, then completely locking up mid-use until the battery ran completely down and got recharged. Finally it got to the point where anytime you turned it on it made a noise like it was grinding coffee beans in its guts and then gave the sad, dead iPod icon. Because it was a replacement, it only had a 90 day warranty. I took it to the Apple store, but they told me it would be cheaper to buy a new one...

Which brings us to my third, current iPod. While not completely dead, it is hobbled to the point where I can't use it the way I'd like to. At thirteen months the head phone jack started having problems, such that if your headphone plug wasn't turned in just the right way, you could only hear out of one ear. Then the click wheel started becoming randomly unresponsive, sometimes just saying "no you can't skip to the next song - I LIKE this one." Now it freezes mid-use until the battery is totally discharged (deja vu!) AND won't hold a charge for longer than a few hours, whether it is being used or not. It's not completely useless - I'm going to try using it with my new iHome (thanks Mom!) where it can always be plugged in - but it does mean that I'll need a new mp3 player for aforementioned walking around the city purposes.

This leads me to my dilemma: do i buy another iPod? I've got all this iTunes music that will only work with iPod (unless I burn it all to CD and re-import it) and have thousands of songs from CD already in my iTunes (which, again, will only work with iPod). At the same time, I'm really not into the idea of shelling out $250 annually for the privilege of using a shoddy product. Any thoughts, people?