Way back in August of 2005 I mentioned in passing that my iPod had died while I was on a road trip. Well, the iPod I was given under warranty in early September was working fine until a couple of days ago. Since I didn't really go into detail, I'll elaborate here.

The first failure started as an occasional faint clicking sound while playing, I suspect it came from the hard drive, and the occasional tendency to skip forward, out of the song it was playing. I didn't think much of it at the time since it had also had the occasional tendency to reboot while playing. I figured it was a corrupted mp3 file that I just needed to find and remove since that was what all the forums recommended for that particular problem.

After a while, I was driving through Missouri or Illinois or someplace like that and the iPod just stopped playing. "Ok, maybe it's a dead battery." I thought. When I connected it up to my laptop that night, it started up and gave me a complaint about not being able to communicate with the device and suggested that I restore it using the iPod updater. Well, screw that: I've got 37GB of music on there and a week left on my trip. Of course, rebooting and recharging did nothing, so I ended up restoring it using the iPod updater but that didn't fix the problem. What I got was a little folder icon with a warning sign in it and the text "http://www.apple.com/support/ipod/". Anyway, nothing I did would help and I ended up taking it back to the Apple Store in Roseville where they said "Yeah, if it asks you what language you want every time you reboot, the drive's dead." They also listened to it really close when rebooting it to see what kind of noises the hard drive made. I can tell you, none of them were good.

So, one iPod replaced under warranty. Woot!

The second iPod died in a similar fashion. I would occasionally get a message from iTunes saying that the device MiPod could not be written to, please restore it using the iPod updater. If I just disconnected the cable and reconnected it (it wasn't mounted at this point so that's Ok to do) it would suddenly be recognized by iTunes and the automatic playlist update would work fine. Then, one day, that didn't work. since I was at home, I found that restoring my iPod and clearing off all the music was a much easier thing to deal with, so I did that and got that same "http://www.apple.com/support/ipod/" message I had dreaded, yet thought quite cute. Back to the Apple Store

At the Apple Store, they listened to it boot, connected it to their laptop and got all the same messages I did. They ran the iPod updater's restore feature and it worked for them! Yay, my iPod is Ok. When I took it home however, I got the same "device could not be written to" message while I was copying files back onto it. After 2 more restores and tries to write to it, I found that it would die at around 100 to 150 songs. Back to the Apple Store

At the Apple Store, they said "here's your new iPod". Well, they also said "your warranty is up" and "your Apple Care policy will cover it".

So I am now on my 3rd iPod and, at $250 per replacement, my Apple Care Warranty has gone way, way beyond the paying for itself stage

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