Notes on a Broken iPod
- The Genius Bar is a good thing: free face-to-face troubleshooting for any Apple product. Note, however: (a) you need an appointment, which you can get online, (b) you apparently need to sign in even if you have an appointment, which is not at all clear when you arrive, and (c) there is a separate Genius Bar just for iPods, which is past the regular Genius Bar, and which really, really isn't clear when you arrive.
- It actually can be cost effective to repair an iPod. Portatronics replaced my batter and my clickwheel in under 10 minutes. The charge was, IIRC, $30 for labor, $20 for a the wheel, and $50 for the battery. Which means as long as my hard drive doesn't die (knock wood), I've got an essentially new 30GB iPod for about $100. Apple wanted to sell me a 5GB Nano for $120.
- Trying to get your iPod working with Linux is not worth the effort.* The filesystem is liable to get corrupted if you look at it funny and gtkPod is laughably unusable.
* For those of you who are non-technical or who are tired of the Linux posts: I have my reasons!
2 comments:
Maybe you got lucky with Portatronics. I took them a simple battery replacement job, one solder connection, on another (non-iPod) mp3 player--even brought them large step-by-step photos. Know-it-all dweeb tossed aside photos, roughly pulled the unit apart and broke the motherboard. Now I can have that fixed for $150 by the manufacturer. I wouldn't trust Portatronics to refill a parking meter.
Sorry to hear about your bad experience. I think Portatronics can probably fix older iPods (I've got a pre-video, pre-Nano-era 30GB model) with their eyes closed. I'm not sure I'd trust them with anything else.
Post a Comment