I wasn’t even sure how long I had my 5th generation classic, but it’s at least 7 years because I found an iTunes store receipt email from May of 07. I’m sure the battery lasted hundreds of charge cycles, maybe in the thousand neighborhood because I used it very heavily.
I’ve been expecting the battery’s death for some years now, and thinking about buying a replacement player, but I really didn’t find anything with enough memory (damn you, Cloud!).
Last week the battery stopped holding its charge, though it still worked fine when docked to something with external power. And low and behold, I found a replacement battery at Amazon for under 8 bucks! I was so there.
Changing the battery was rather troublesome because I have clumsy fingers, but I wisely didn’t chuck it all in the corner in frustration, and after about 20 minutes of pawing at it, I got the connection made and got it all back together.
Whoo hoo! 60 plus gigs of tunes in my pockets for 8 bucks!
Good to see you did the right thing and fixed it rather than chucking it.
I love fixing things so many Xmases ago FtGKid2 gave me two broken IPods he bought off of eBay on purpose so I could have fun with them. Got them both fixed, one for me and one for MrsFtG (who is using hers right now). Keep them working with occasional new batteries and once a new drive (dropped mine).
But, I must warn you. That $8 battery you bought isn’t going to last very long. Good batteries aren’t that cheap. Next time, spend a few more bucks.
I love SanDisk Sansa mp3 players. They’re small, lightweight (about the size of a ipod shuffle), have more features (screen, FM radio, voice recording), & are dirt cheap. They are also expandable with a MicroSD card. I like the + better than the Zip, but the latter has a color screen & shows album art, too.
I understand wanting to save money by not buying a new one, but what is essentially the current update of the same model (they didn’t start calling it Classic until the 6th) has 160 Gb. Interestingly, I had the earlier G6 and now the newest (replaced due to theft) and the HD is 2x larger except I think $100 cheaper now. How very un-Apple.
I had an iPod classic battery die a few years ago, and I went the replacement battery route. That was a holy bitch to replace, though. I don’t think that I could convince myself to do it again.
And the iPod seems to have some disk issues that I can’t figure out how to fix. When playing certain songs, it just stops, probably due to a bad sector (or piece thereof). I’ve found sites that say if I hold four buttons down at the same time and chant the appropriate incantation, the iPod will launch into a HD repair mode, but I haven’t gotten it to work.
Go with the folks at iFixIt. They also have instructions on how to do basic repairs of a lot of Apple and some other products.
One of the problem with replacement batteries is that the “brand” is just a label someone stuck on it. You can’t be sure buying from some places (eBay, Amazon affiliates, etc.) if the label is genuine or not.
Add me to the list of folks that resurrected an old iPod. Think it’s a 4th gen and about 11 years old. With any luck, it will be a couple more years before the drive decides to croak. Plus another vote for iFixit.
