In the interest of being complete about documentation here, I now am on my fourth iPod. Tuesday afternoon, I grabbed MiPod, plugged in the iTrip and hit "Shuffle Songs". I don't remember what the screen said it was about to play, but it skipped that and played the next song. Since I kind of wanted to hear that first song, I hit the back button and MiPod displayed the grayscale screen of death.

I signed up for a genius appointment yesterday morning and showed up at the Rosedale Apple Store at 5:00 that evening. The nice man behind the counter took MiPod into the back room, and I waited. When he came out, he said the hard drive cable had been loose and he just reconnected it. MiPod looked alive again and I was happy.

On the way out to the car, I started remembering the other symptoms of a dead iPod. In particular, the lack of ability to remember what language I spoke. I rebooted MiPod and waited for the Apple to go away and it asked me to choose a language. OK, maybe somehow he skipped that in the store. I chose English. I rebooted again. I chose English again and headed back into the store. On the way in, I checked out what the "About" screen said, and it came up with a drive capacity of zero.

We reformatted the drive and ran the iPod updater software and everything looked good. I insisted that we copy a bunch of music onto it because it hung at around 100 songs last time. We put 111 songs and 2.6GB of data onto it and everything looked fine again. Then I rebooted it. "Please choose your language" it said. "OK" the Apple genius said, and handed me a new iPod. He also said that, since this was my fourth iPod, If something like this happens again we will "pursue other options". I can only assume that means replacing my 40GB click-wheel iPod with something newer. I told him I was satisfied with the service I was getting and that as long as they'd keep replacing them, I'd keep bringing them in. He told me that after a while, there's a point where that just doesn't seem like enough and he'd reached that point.

This is in no way to be taken as a rant against Apple or iPods. They're one of the best products I've had except for the fact that mine keep dying. The guy at the store had a first-generation iPod and I know people with older iPods that have lasted longer. Apple continues to be willing to replace my iPods under my Apple Care extended warrantee. That last sentence in that last paragraph says a lot too. They want me, their customer to be happy with my purchase and I still am.

Here's to getting a 60GB 'Pod next time

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