iTunes for Windows Breaking Older iPods

evil_liam asks: "In our office we've been running an older 5gb iPod with both Macs and PC's (using Xplay), but when we installed iTunes for the PC the iPod stopped working. Songs and playlists transfer over fine, and you can see them and play them in iTunes, but you can't listen to them on the iPod, itself. It shows the song details and so forth, but skips through the tracks, playing 0 seconds of each one until it finishes. This only applies to tracks added since iTunes was installed. No amount of reformatting, or rolling back firmware seems to work. When I called Apple, they stated that they simply don't support the use of the older Mac iPods on PC's and are not responsible, even though they admit that it was their own software that caused this. We're not alone, see this thread at Apple. I'm not quite suggesting that this was deliberate, but they are aware of it and don't seem to care." Does anyone have ideas on possible fixes for the afflicted iPods?

Comments

How evident is the distinction to consumers?

[sacrilicious]

Yes, it stinks that some people used to do this without problems, and now they're not so lucky. But the bottom line is that nobody should ever have used a Mac iPod on a PC in the first place.

If I understand correctly then there's a "Mac ipod" and a "Windows ipod"? I've browsed the apple store and certainly not had this distinction leap out at me. If Apple is relying on people reading this fine print in order to avoid buying "the wrong kind" of ipod, I'd say that it's Apple responsibility to do far better than that. I hope my understanding is inaccurate, but if not then it's just like a car dealer forcing car buyers to read fine print to see if the car includes the "reverse" gear, something they'll probably not catch otherwise.