After a few months of having issues with my 3G iPod, it has finally died. I'm trying to reformat it now, but I think the hard disk is too corrupted for this to succeed. Yup - there's the failure message now.
Still, it has served me well for the four or so years I've had it.
And before you ask, I won't be upgrading to the iPod Touch - too expensive and not enough space. I quite like having all my music available. Maybe one day the more reliable flash memory will be cheap enough and large enough to replace hard disks, but for now, I'll stick with the iPod Classic while it still lasts.
I can listen to some music on the MacBook. And I can convert some music to Ogg Vorbis format and play it on the PDA, but it won't hold much.
In theory, I could order a replacement now, but I'm thinking about waiting till April (new FBT year) and seeing if someone will give me a dummy receipt for an iPod + MacBook Pro combo.