I do believe the iPod is the most expensive disposable gadget in the world. The iPod is now five years old. I have had three of them because they keep breaking.
Number One, the hard drive failed while at the same time making a nasty whining noise. Number Two, the battery died. There is no place in Saudi to get a battery. Now Number Three has died in a most amusing way. The freaking lock button will not unlock.
I can move the silly thing left and right, but the little ‘lock’ icon stays on the screen and I cannot use the controls. Freaking wonderful. A 2,000 riyal iPod shot to Hell because of a 1 riyal switch. I swear, does any other bit of technical gear have worse reliability, worse repairability than the iPod?
What’s worse is I suspect I will buy a new one by the end of next week. Grumble!
That, or perhaps call Apple. The one time I had a problem with Apple gear, they replaced it for me alarmingly fast, since it was still under warranty. Not sure how the shipping is outside of North America.
(That seems to have gotten it. I swear, I cannot Pit at all. I think you have to be born to Pit properly. Perhaps some community college could offer a class in Pitting. All that being said, iPods are still junk.)
This is a pitting-by-proxy, but our housemate was given an iPod nano for Christmas just last year. About 2 weeks ago it crashed and burned, and now it just sits there showing a greyscale “Battery Dead” style logo (a battery with a line across it) and will not boot up at all. He’s tried a hard reboot according to the instructions he found on apple.com (lost the book) but it still won’t do anything. I’ve told him to contact apple re: the warranty, but he’s just pissed off with it all, because it was less than a year old. Not to mention that for nearly 3 months before it died each time he used it the battery life seemed to go down by a factor of an hour or so.
This is why when I get an MP3 player I’m going to avoid anything by Apple or Sony. Makers like iRiver have enough experience and market share that I can be sure of getting support if I need it, but they aren’t so big that they feel they can dick with me just because I’m locked into their product line. (Proprietary batteries? What kind of shit is that? My wife’s uses an AA.)
Mine’s been perfect, but I do know two people at work who now want to nuke Cupertino due to their iPod troubles. It’s undeniable that there are some lemon units out there, but to have three lemons in a row does seem to be remarkably shitty luck.
I made the fatal error of getting an HP branded iPod. The damn thing freezes all the time even though 90% of the time it is sitting in my car plugged in and has never been dropped shaken or anything rough at all. Apple Store will do nothing and HP just says “sorry warranty is out, buy another”
I’ve rebooted it at least once a day for the past three months. Sometimes it works, mostly it doesn’t. Letting it sit a day seems to do the trick so I get an iPod for about 40% of the time when it comes down to it.
Huh. Odd. My first Nano had the screen problem (first batch), and that got replaced within a few days. Other than that, I’ve not had any problems with my iPods (and my family has 3). I dunno what to say. =/
