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Washington Post Covers iPod Battery Ruckus
An anonymous reader sent in a link to 'Battery and Assault: When His iPod Died, This Music Lover Tackled Apple. Stay Tuned.' in the Washington Post. The article (good reading even if you're familiar with the situation) has Apple reps being rather callous about the issue - I think it's a fairly reasonable assumption that if you spend several hundred dollars on a gizmo, it shouldn't be "disposable". A replacement battery for my cell phone cost $10; one for my cordless phone cost $10; Apple is presumably making a good deal of money on their $99 replacements.
It's the cult of Apple, man. It's a sick, sad marketing plan. Apple routinely rapes its core of customers, who'll gladly bend over and take it rather than taking the ten minutes to learn a different way. They've been doing this since 1984, man. Remember the people who paid $8000 for a Lisa?
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
P.S. Now sit back and watch all of the Apple apologists tack on their explanations of how the Lisa was worth the $8k...
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Uh, you don't need to be so defensive... it's only Apple Computer, not Islam.
Amazing magic tricks
Buy an IPod and you deserve it. Creative for one sell two very good MP3 players with replaceable LIon batteries.
IPod owners are fashion victims. Get over it.
Who ever came up with the interface rules for the Vi editor needs to be dragged out on the street and shot. AArrrgggghhhhhhaaaaaa!!!!!!!!
Life is not for the lazy.
I had (well, I still have I gues) A PDA with a replaceable battery. There was one tiny quarter-inch switch to unlock the door, and tiny seam around it. The Ipod would not need to look much different in order to allow battery replacement, if it had been well designed.
The iPod is well designed. Look how small it is! Isn't that cool?
A couple months ago, apple was just telling people to throw their ipods away if the battery died. I mean come on, they didn't even plan for this. How is that not poor design? What good is a "cool and good looking" device if you have to throw it away in a year and a half? $99/year isn't a bad deal at this point though, but it's an obvious hack solution.
Go and buy an iPod competitor, which will either be bigger, have no hard drive, take longer to upload to, have a non solid-state controls, have jaggy edges, have a crap user interface, or some combination thereof.
Yeah, maybe. But it might also have the ability to record audio, either from a mic or an optical input, maybe it'll have the ability to edit play lists on the fly, maybe it'll have built in Ethernet, maybe it'll play OOG and FLAC, etc etc etc. The features of the iPod are not the end-all be all of mp3 players. There is a huge selection with differing feature sets. The iPods niche is rabid fanboy's who can't even conceive of buying a competing product, and don't look at what else is available.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Er, you obviously never saw any Apple product from up close. Apple products are not computers; they're fashion statements made for technical ignoramuses for whom looks is everything. The boxen are designed for looks only, and heaven forbid the user may want to look inside, much less change something inside! This is a job better left to the Apple priest, at the friendly neighbourhood Apple temple. And the priests only take first-born virgins for payment! And to enforce this, products have been designed to be firmly sealed and openable only after the proper tools and incantations and rain dances have been applied in the prescribed fashion.
What's worse, whole industries have been suckered-up with the Apple mantra, and have been overcharged for dubious-quality software that is full of little legacy shortcomings (like, for example, not being able to move a dialog box around to see another window, or resizing file list column widths that are carefully designed to hide the last few characters of file names) [okay, okay, this has been FINALLY addressed in OS-X], or handicapped mice (poor mouse. Just one stupid button. And no scroll wheel) on otherwise rather good but still grossly overpriced hardware...
Apple users are blissfully letting themselves bled dry by a company that's nothing but image. And they love it and ask for more!
Suckers.