right on bro!

My iPod bit the dust yesterday. I took it to the car to drive to a client meeting, and when I powered it up, it was devoid of songs. When I got back, I tried re-sync’ing it and it froze up about 1/3 of the way through. I tried resetting the iPod, restoring the firmware, running chkdsk on it, formatting it in Windows, and formatting it on another machine. All of this, and it still kept freezing up. Then I noticed the hard drive constantly clicking when it froze - uh-oh, failure city.

So I scheduled an appointment at the Genius Bar at the Apple store in Santa Monica today (which was pretty convenient - I showed up exactly on time and they were calling my name). I figured the iPod would still be under its 1-year warranty - after all, the unit came out in October. And it was. However, there’s some fine print.

After describing the problems, the Mac Genius told me that the one year warranty doesn’t mean you get free service for a year. That’s just for the first six months. After the second six months, there’s a $29.99 service fee for them to do anything. Which is kind of like a warranty, except you still have to pay for it. In fact, the Mac Genius recommended I buy the AppleCare Protection Plan, which would cost an additional $30, but would extend my warranty for another year with no service fees in case the replacement unit has problems as well.

I felt kind of like I was being suckered, but I’ve had such a good experience with the iPod since I got it, so I bought the AppleCare plan, and they swapped units. I did not get an off-the-shelf one - I got one in a brown box that was just the iPod itself. It says in the letter also, that when you get a replacement iPod, it may be either new or refurbished. Mine looks pristine, so I guess that’s okay as long as it doesn’t crap out after a year and a half. We’ll see.

The new/refurb iPod is now sync’ing and it hasn’t frozen up so far, so we’ll see. Overall, apart from the surprise of having to spend more money to get a new unit, the whole process was pretty painless.

Also, I just got the new Rainer Maria album in the mail today. I think it got mixed reviews, but it’s totally catchy, well-written pop/rock, and I think it’s going to be the album of the summer for me.