My iPod - it's alive!!

Here's my outdated looking iPod Photo 30 GB, back when it was brand spanking new when I bought in on 4/15/05. Earlier this week, less than two years later, I got the dreaded sad iPod face with a bad clicking sound.

It had been acting up recently, not playing songs (or rather podcasts, playing songs is a rarity), losing its memory (or really its FAT) and complaining of low battery especially when it was cold (it doesn't like the cold regardless). Like a good doobie, I went to the Apple support site to find it was a hardware problem. After trying the few things listed, I started to put in a service request. After muddling through 5 pages, they said it would be $268 to fix it!! I could buy a new one for less! Of course I was at work and I couldn't actually browse the Apple iPod site since it was restricted, but Jenn looked it up and found that I could get a 30GB video iPod for $249. But I really wanted the next generation iPod with the cool iPhone widescreen touchscreen (I assume they will make one someday, preferrably with 32G or more flash memory). But what was I going to do in the mean time? I was so sad that my beloved iPod was dead, I almost cried. Jenn was consoling me, saying "Just think of all the pleasure it's given you." I can't even imagine life without it and I use it every time I'm in the car, on the plane, at the gym or need to shut out people jabbering at work.

I started looking on eBay to see if I could sell it for something and found that the sad iPods were selling for around $40. Hmm, are these people buying them and fixing them? Then I googled for fixing the sad iPod. I found more than 10 people say they fixed it by banging it on the table or dropping it on the floor. I had nothing to lose at that point, so I dropped it (still in its silicone sleeve) 4 feet onto the carpeted floor at work. I picked it up and reset it and low and behold, it was working perfectly again. My guess is that a drive arm got stuck and dropping it jarred it back into place.

Then I figured out that those people were buying up sad iPods, dropping them and then reselling them, for a profit of about $110. What a racket! And to imagine Apple sucking $268 from people with poor googling abilities!! I know they can't in good conscience tell people to bang their iPod to fix it, but they could at least hint strongly. Anyway, I'm so grateful that it is working again and don't have to shell out the bucks for a new one. I swore I would buy the extended warranty on a new one, but lets hope they go flash this time like the rumors say.