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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 is a rather lousy design. I have a new 30GB iPod and the battery status and recharge times are just goofy and all over the place. Yes. I have upgraded software.
Just poor design. Nice and shiny on the outside, but terrible engineering elsewhere. And yes. This battery problem is simply terrible, embarassing engineering.
Mr. Jobs' ego is too big to admit to this problem. Anyone who defends Apple in any other regard just has to look at how they handle goofs like this. It says an awful lot about the company.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Prices for Sony's lapttop batteries are even more obscene. $300 for a new batter??
...on how laptop batteries should be standardized. It never received any feedback, though, so I didn't start the petition.
But I still wonder why companies still don't come up with a standard form factor. Come on, it's a GOOD thing to have a standard battery form factor. Where is the business sense in keeping a large stock of special-sized batteries for your product that may become useless before you can sell it to your customers?
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You may like my a cappella music
although the battery is covered the length of the warranty. In all fairness I think this is overblown. I have the older 20 gig model and found it rather simple to replace the battery. The hardest part is getting the back case off, but it'd be nearly impossible to break the thing swapping the battery when the case is already off. (as these guys said they did)
I think the big issue here is that apple has met demand and lowered prices on alot of it's hardware. In change, they've started charging for software that they hadn't in the past. I think it's upsetting the core audience into believing they are getting bled. To a certain extent, I feel that way. It ends up being that you don't really *need* to buy any of this stuff.
I can't quite agree with Apple's support being particularly helpful.
Apple's been making a huge push to get businesses (outside of visual design and their other niche markets) to use their products, and I bought into it and recently purchased a 17" PowerBook G4 laptop to use for my consulting work. Since I purchased it (about four months ago,) it has failed twice, necessitating a mainboard replacement each time. However, Apple has no provision for on-site or even at-the-store replacement of notebook parts, so the machine has to be shipped back to a depot for repairs. This process takes at least five days if everything goes perfectly. Five days without my primary business machine is a lot of money gone, plus delays foisted off onto unhappy clients. When I called Apple, they were unable to amelioriate the situation in any fashion (for instance, by providing me with a notebook to use in the meantime,) nor would they consider replacing the unit, despite two complete failures in two months, and they were quite snippy about it to boot.
If I had purchased from Dell or Sony, I could have had a repaired or new computer in one or two days. At this point, I'm considering the notebook expendable, and if it breaks again, I'm going to purchase one from a company that can provide business-class support.
I have a 1st gen 10GB that is 2 years old, I beat it, drop it, drain the battery, do 5% charges, 95% charges, it's plugged in 50% of the time, and in use the other 50% of the time. My iPod NEVER sees a day of rest, never leaves my side, and pretty much never is inactive.
It runs my work stereo, my house stereo, and my car stereo. Literally, it's ALWAYS ON.
Last week I turned it on at 9am, and ran it with Sound Check and EQ's turned ON, and it ran until 5:30 where it politely told me it was about to die, then died about 2 minutes later. I'd say 8 1/2 hours is fine out of a 2 year old machine that gets abused as hard as I treat it.
Or should I be a bitch like everyone else and complain because I'm not getting the advertised 10 hours?
I was given an iPod as a gift and I adore it. There's one thing to keep in mind that isn't covered in the Post article, nor in the iPod's Dirty Secret film. As the Post mentioned, the iPod is good for something like 500 charges. Now the thing to keep in mind, is that if you don't listen to tons of music, 500 charges amounts to many, many years of use. A charge lasts me a good six or seven hours, and I doubt if I listen to more than an hour of music a day. So figure one charge a week, or fifty charges a year. So, for somebody like me, 500 charges lasts nearly a decade (assuming the battery doesn't crap out before that due to old age.)
There are two things that separate people like me from the Neistat Bros. First is that they listen to a whole lot more music than I do. Second, it seems like they listen to all of their music on their iPod. By comparison, I listen to most of my music on my stereo, and only put on my iPod for trance and classical stuff, where I prefer headphones. For people like me, who listen to their iPods for less than an hour a day, battery life is a non-issue. In five or ten years, I would hope that it would not be worth my time to replace the battery. At that time, I'd be more than happy to plunk down, say, $200 for a low-end iPod capable of storing 100,000 songs and twelve feature-length movies ;)
One last thing to keep in mind. Good old Steve has had a thing for hermetically sealed boxes since the days of the original Mac, when opening up one to insert a hard drive would void your warranty. And for most people, hermetically sealed is the way to go. If you're a power computer user, you want an expandable computer; and if you're a serious music lover, a sealed solution like an iPod is a poor solution. But there's a certain beauty in keeping things elegant and for making something meant for everyday users.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
The fact that Apple doesn't have a good hardware support program comparable to Dell's does not mean that their Support folks aren't helpful.
Of course they're going to be snippy if you demand hardware replacement when they have no such program.
If I had purchased from Dell or Sony..
Dell would have had a person replace your system board the next day if you had bought the extended support program. This is not built into the machine base price with Dell, it's extra (and worth it).
Compare the price of external SCSI cables! I remember looking at CompUSA for one when I needed a replacement Right-NOW to fix an HP workstation. $69 for a 3' ( one meter) Belkin SCSI-1 cable. The only SCSI items in the store were in the Apple section. Belkin cables were available mail order for about $10 back then. All I can surmise is this: Apple users are used to paying more, so the retailers shaft them every chance they get, part of the mistique of owning an Apple. Time for the consumers to revolt...
A Lithium-ion battery slowly looses its charge even when no power is being drawn from it. So when your iPod indicates that the battery is low, charge it. Don't let it sit around in a low-charge state, it will only discharge itself more. And remember that when an iPod is off, it is not really off, it goes into a sleep mode where it draws a minimal current from the battery.
This won't be a problem for me since I can't go more that a couple of days without using my iPod. But if you leave your iPod sitting around (not charging) for a while, eventually the iPod will drain the battery until the battery level gets so low that the iPod actully turns fully off and then the battery will continue to loose charge because of the nature of Li-ion batteries.
My Archos has everything an iPod has, costs a lot less, and runs off 4 AA NiMHs.
I think he might have ment 'can be used _at the same time_ by multiple computers'. In either case, both ipod and karma require outside assistance to get them to work with Linux...not horrid, though not bundled in the packaged either.
I'm not sure I understand this. Are you saying that since the extra features exist in the Karma, and Apple does not metion the lack of those features other people who are choosing an audio device like an ipod can't consider the extra features if they compare the ipod to the karma?
Apple makes good products. Apple DOES NOT make good products ALL the time. They had a buring laptop problem a few years ago, if memory serves me.
No, though you are overly defensive. Why, I can't say.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Apple's engineering Wizards could have designed an easy-to-service battery if they had wanted to. Rather, it seems the decision was made to turn an EASY replacement into a revenue stream. Why are so many posters (not the parent in particular) trying to rationalize corporate greed? Just be honest, and call an elephant an elephant when you see one.
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Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
NOTE: iPod equipment that is sent in for battery service or service requiring other repairs will be replaced with functionally equivalent new, used, or refurbished iPod equipment. You will not receive the same iPod that was sent in for service.
How does that work for engraved backs?