I have a 3rd generation 20 gig iPod, and after 14 months the battery is shot :mad:
I’m replacing it with a third-party battery, and am curious what I can do to extend the life of the new battery. Do they develop a memory? Should I allow it to fully drain before recharging?
Should I not leave it in the charger-dock after it’s fully charged?
The new battery is :
“developed with the same lithium-ion polymer battery technology as the original and it is rated at 3.7 volts and 850mAh”
Thanks!
This is probably what killed it. Li-Ion batteries, while not subject to memory (neither are NiCds, contrary to popular belief, but that’s another story), are somewhat susceptible to damage by overcharging. The big enemy of all battery chemistries is heat. Heat drives off water which is necessary for the chemical reactions inside. Less water = less capacity. Rapid chargers are particulary bad in this regard. Rapid charging means a high charging current, which in turn means a lot of waste heat. If at all possible, you should trickle charge your batteries, and don’t keep them in hot places, like a closed car in the sun. They’ll thank you for it.
Yebbut, doesn’t the iPod automatically stop charging when the battery is full? All the devices I own that use Li-Io (Iriver H120, GBA SP, Nintendo DS) do that, or at least the charge light turns off.
Not exactly. Some go into trickle mode when they detect the battery is mostly full, adn some do sto charging completely, and will monitor the battery, supplying charging current when needed to keep it topped off. The rub is that most chargers can’t detect when an individual cell has reached full charge. Cells are not all identical, and each may discharge and recharge at a slightly different rate than the others. What almost always happens is that you have one cell inside the battery pack that reaches full charge before the others. If the charger hasn’t decided that the pack is full, it will keep pushing current through it. This eventually kills the cell, which in turn, kills the battery pack.
Shouldn’t matter with the iPod, should it? ipodbattery.com says their batteries are 3.7 Volts, which seems to be the cell voltage for lithium ion, if I did my googling correctly.
Then again, I suppose it could have more than one cell in paralell.
That seems to be about right. The problem here may be cheap chargers. According to this page, Li-Ion batteries are particularly fiddly to recharge, and there are very strict conditions which need to be adhered to in order to insure proper and safe charging.
So what’s the deal? I can re-charge the iPod at any time (dead battery or half-dead battery) but once it’s full, I should unhook it?
You think Apple might mention this, cosidering when the iPod is connected to a PC via firewire, it’s constantly charging.
The iPod is a potentially great device, but I am disgusted by the terrible battery life. When I say it’s dead at 14 months, I also mean it was mostly dead at 10 months. That’s pretty crappy for a $300 item with a “non-replaceable” battery.
(yeah, I know Apple will “fix” the problem, but they charge $99 and send you a reconditioned iPod, not yours with a new battery.)
:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:
That’s funny as NASA discovered and AFAIK coined the term with NiCd’s. But what I think you mean is what most people call memory is really voltage depression, where the power is there, but not at the rated voltage.
Nimh batts do also have either a voltage depression or memory or both effect (it is not immune) but is more resistant.
Li-ion do not have this, but have a limited life span. As soon as it leaves the factory is it already doomed, the battery is eating itself alive and will only last so long. This is not to say that you can’t kill it faster, but you can’t do squat to extend it’s life. Also most Li-ion batteries have a built in limiter to avoid overcharging, the devices known to explode (some cell phones) don’t have this limiter.
As for the ipod, it has a long history of bad batteries, not exploding ones, just short life. A while back someone made a personal campain to notify the world that IPOD’s nonreplaceable battery only lasts 18 months. I guess it now should be restated that IPOD’s aftermarket replaceable battery only lasts only 14 months.
:mad:
$300 PLUS A $70 Dollar battery every 14 months.
This is not helping alleviate my negative feelings towards Apple and all the folks at iPod.
:mad:
I find the 3g extended battery for 30 dollars pretty much everywhere I look.
Is that kind of battery life really that unusual? I mean, what other battery-powered object do you use for up to 8 hours a day, recharge at night, and still have some functionality out of 14-18 months later?
My wife would love to get that kind of performance from her laptop.
In case anyone is interested, here’s how Apple suggests you treat your iPod battery.
cellphone, palm (non-color) pda? I often wonder just how long a laptop could go if it was B&W instead of color.
But point well taken, if one really uses it 8h/d for 14-18 months I would think one can’t complain. That’s about 3000 hrs for $70 (cost of replacement battery in the OP) or $0.023 per hr not including the cost of electricity.
I can change my laptop battery in about a minute, my cell battery in about 20 seconds. The iPod battery is considered unreplaceable, and if you try, you void any remaining warranty.
I came nowhere near 8 hours of use per day. I guess what bugs me is that Apple doesn’t tell you anywhere that this $300 item has an expected life of 18 months, then time to buy a new one.
Out of interest has Apple ever said why they made the battery a sealed, none changable unit? I love my pod, I really do, but it just seems like such an obvious design error.
My WAGS are:
1 - they were satified that lets say 80% of the batteries will last 3 years.
2 - Like most all computer items, price keeps falling and capacity goes up. By the time the battery is used up you will want to upgrade anyway.
3 - They were sold a bill of goods, meaning they were lied to about the capacity of the batteries.
Do you have a cite that says that they send you a reconditioned ipod?
They don’t transfer the hard drive either, you are supposed to back everything up first, even though you shouldn’t be able to upload music from iPod to PC (at least not without some friendly third-party software).
I want to make clear, I love my iPod, it’s literally changed the way I listen to music. I have most of my cd collection with at all times now. However my bad luck with the battery has soured the love a bit 
Dude, that sucks. I love my ipod! I don’t want a different one, even if it’s just like it! :mad: