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100 million iPods sold? Maybe we need the repair/replacement numbers too.

Apparently the 10 million iPod owners just keep buying another one, once they see the "Sad Face" icon.

Okay, I'm not going to go off on Apple/iPod/iTunes today. Let them enjoy the benchmark.  I do have to recognize that my 3rd generation iPod has not really had any special problems.  That's not to say it hasn't been a horror-free time with the iPod.  I now know that my scary moments were similar to other people's. I'm happy to renumerate them here for you:

  1. I bought a 15GB iPod for my wife, for her birthday.  At the time I knew I had no way of getting songs onto it. I don't think iTunes for Windows was out, but if it was it didn't matter because I was using a hand-me-down laptop that could barely avoid crashing when opening Notepad. So I went to one Mac-friend's place and loaded some albums I know the wife likes (Bob Dylan, Rage Against the Machine, Pixies, Cypress Hill, etc) and then headed to another Mac-friend's place to do the same.  BAM! You know what happen. iTunes wanted to re-sync the iPod (i.e. delete everything). Luckily we read the pop-up and declined.

  2. When the 2nd Mac-friend saw the Bob Dylan collection, he saw 2 albums he hadn't heard. So we thought (like 95% of all new iPod owners think) that we could drop those tunes on his machine. NOPE!  iTunes/iPod is of course designed as a one-way transfer. This freaked out my buddy and me for a while, we knew it was possible but didn't know why it wasn't working.  "Did I already break the iPod!" I thought.  Well, no. The 1st Mac-friend was using a 3rd-party software to get the two-way transfer to work (or we could have tried this). Phew! At least it wasn't broken.
  3. Then the next one came when my wife had a freak out. Now let's get something straight. When you drop 300 bucks on something, and use it the way your supposed to use it, then it damn better work the way it is supposed to. So here's what happened. The second or third time my wife took the iPod to workout, it wouldn't turn on. She slid the Hold switch on and off several times and got nothing. She came home all upset because she was afraid she hit it against something when it was in her pursue. Several months previously I had read that the Hold switch needs an extra nudge, even when no orange is showing, to get it off hold. So I tried giving a little extra push with the fingernail and the iPod revived. That's a design flaw.  I have no clue if that was fixed subsequently.

  4. Well this really doesn't count, but I had to replace the battery once it started crapping out after two years. It wasn't that difficult and the battery wasn't expensive. But don't forget: YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO THAT.  $300 and only two years of operation and it's dead.  Designed not to last, design not to be tweaked to last.


Now you'll notice there's no "I got the sad face icon" or "screen frozen on main menu" or "won't show up in iTunes" or any other problems that seem to plague iPodders out there (covered in our iPod zChannel). I think I know why:
  • We very rarely re-sync the iPod with the computer.
  • When home, the iPod was in the dock, connected to the wall charger.
By never re-syncing, we didn't allow the iPod software to get slowly corrupted over time. I don't have facts to back this up, but seems that all software makes mistakes here and there. Those build up and then causes problems. That why most software troubleshooting starts with "Uninstall, then reinstall. See if that helps."

By always charging.... well I don't really know how that helped. And nobody who has bought an iPod since the 4th gen will get to find out because Apple stop shipping it with a wall charger.
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Comments
  • Posted by: george.frick_5285 at 10 Apr 10:21 permalink
    30gb 5th gen ipod. I beat the crap out of it and it never has failed me. I don't 'sync' it, set it to manual on the main screen ("I want to manually manage my music"). Battery is still awesome - awesome, but i'm only about a year in. Please consider that with 100 million of the buggers out there a percentage will be mistreated by reported as failing, and a percentage will sneak out of the factory with bad parts, and a percentage will fail. Never heard of "yield" on processors?
    • Posted by: RJ45 at 10 Apr 22:55 permalink
      Actually, I've never heard of yield on processors. What does that do?

      I didn't mean to go totally into the "anti-iPod" side of things, our iPod had been a sanity-saver many times, but no one can excuse the planned-obsolescence of the nearly un-replaceable battery. When I did it, knowing one slip would flush $300 dollar down the toilet was nerve racking to say the least.
    • Posted by: hingerty_3802 at 06 Aug 06:20 permalink
      I have found an excellent guy, Blake, who works at ifixipodsfast.com. Send your sixck ipods to him. Half the time he just charges for parts! If its a simple fix. He does diagnostic for 5 bucks, then he lets ya know how much, and when. I cant say enuff good about this guy.
      • Posted by: deantroi_3296 at 01 Aug 08:20 permalink
        I can't say enough lousy stuff about this guy. He sent me a junked 4th gen ipod logic board which I paid him $50.00 for off his website, and now I can't get any kind of response from him at all. Nice work if you can get it.