Comment Articles

Dead iPod syndrome - no volt found?

Rupert Goodwins ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 12 Jan 2004 13:50 GMT

People power. It's a wonderful thing if you're boycotting a company that markets cigarettes to children, a fearsome anarchy if you're a paediatrician being lynched by an anti-paedophile mob who can't spell.

Add the Net to people power and the fur really flies. In the early days of the personal computer revolution, activists were wont to describe PCs as thought amplifiers -- all those things you could only dream about, such as writing a novel, designing a house, working out pi to five million decimal places, you could now do. The Net does the same for opinions: with a digital camera, movie software and a Web site you can turn a stale crumb of a whinge into a sumptuous banquet for millions.

Which is what happened when Casey and Van Neistat, two video-editing brothers from New York City, found their iPod batteries dead a mere eighteen months after purchase. In Manhattan, a working iPod is more important to life support than Neil Armstrong's electric rucksack ever was -- "Cupertino, we have a problem," said the brothers Neistat. "Sorry, lads," said tech support. "Out of warranty, and you can't replace it. Send it back with two hundred dollars in used bills and we'll fix it. Might as well buy a new one."

You or I would punch the air at this point and squeal like orgasmic rats: a cast-iron excuse to upgrade. Alas, not the Neistats. Retro is now so fashionable that a 'first generation iPod' is a bona-fide antique already. So they did what any reasonable person would do -- they made a movie of themselves flyposting anti-Apple agitprop all over the burg, slapped on a backing track of the tech support phone call that got their gander, and bunged it on the Web.

It had everything: the little people against the big corporation, the cutting edge of consumer action, and the coolest gizmo on the planet. It was hugely popular, and spread through the blogosphere at the speed of trite. The one thing missing was accuracy.

For while it was true that the feisty Neistats had been hard done by, they had fallen between the cracks. Apple had a much more sensible battery replacement policy ready to roll -- it just didn't expect the first lot of dead iPods to crop up quite so soon. The warranty ran out at a year; the batteries of the heaviest users might start to poop out at around two years. Well before that, Apple had a hundred-dollar fix in the works (and third parties could see you right for fifty). By the time the video version of J'Accuse hit the Web, the problem was fixed. (Not in Europe: we haven't had our iPods long enough for that.)

What's frustrating is that the dynamic duo do have a point.