hahahaha so true! basically there are 2 types of viable memory right now. Hard Drive memory and Flash or RAM memory. Most players use HD's because they are very cheap to produce and have huge storage capacities. However, they have moving parts inside (picture a turn table that reads and writes off a record crammed inside a little box) which can easily be damaged as they are super fragile. One drop and it can be toast. They also are terrible performers in the cold weather, because again there are moving parts which cannot tolerate the cold. So basically, HD's are very cheap, great memory abilities, but very unreliable.
Now flash memory or Random Access Memory is a solid state card or chip. It is almost indestructible because there are no moving parts. You literally could throw that card above off a sky scraper and it would most likely work no problem. It also is very quick at retrieving information, as it is random access and does not need to wait for the Hard drive to spin to the correct location to get data. Another great thing is it does not use any power to operate. It merely has current run through it to get the information, where as the HD needs a ton of battery power to spin the disc (picture a CD player compared to an small flash of course mp3 player). Now this all sounds great and it is, but the catch is Flash memory is really expensive! As you remember apple just a few years ago was charging 250 for a 4 gb nano, when if you spent 50 more, you could get a 30 gb HD player.Only 4 years ago, 8 gb's was
$226!!! Totally impractical. So now prices are dropping, but apple is being stubborn and not using the available technology to offer us a reasonable priced high capacity flash player. (right now the nano should be offered in 16/32 gb's)
Hope that helped.
Oh and to those interested in replacing your click wheel....I just remembered that I actually replaced the face place (black) onto a white ipod frame. So if you are interested, you can order a new face plate off ebay for very cheap and achieve either what I have, or white ipod with black wheel(looks amazing)