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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.
or you could read the article which states
"Some of the e-mail the Neistat Brothers received from "iPod's Dirty Secret" came from people who were quick to tell them "that we're [bleep]ing imbeciles, [because] you can buy a battery online and do it yourself," Casey says.
The brothers already tried that.
They Googled around and ordered the battery from a different vendor that came with complicated instructions and "these two plastic gigantic toothpicks," Casey says. It took a while to pry the back cover off the iPod's impenetrable design. Beneath that was "a gummy adhesive" which covered the mini hard drive, "and there were these two very tiny connectors with three prongs," in a work space "about the diameter of a needle."
He felt as if he was performing amateur neurosurgery."
Of course, I can't have any sympathy for the guy for going out and buying another iPod after the incident.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Was it Apple branded or was it 3rd party? Because to my knowledge Apple doesn't make it's own dock connector --> RCA patch. For what it's worth, the Apple store online has a kit from Monster Cable which includes the mini-stereo to RCA connector, a dock connectior to firewire cable, a dock, & the power adpater. That's USD80 and actually worth it. The dock and the power adapter will cost you $80 by themselves if purchased separately. I think you just got hit by a greedy retailer --- no reason to blame Apple for that.
It's a Li+ battery, good for around 500 charges. That's about 1.5yrs battery lifetime on your iPod if you use it every day, like I do.
Recently, I did a battery replacement on my iPod. I wrote about it here in my journal.
For people who claim to be all for working on your own hardware, you're all getting pretty bitchy about performing a five-minute, three step process.
Oh, and my battery cost me half of what Apple is charging. So nyah.
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