My iPod shuffle iBroke overnight. It won't play, it won't charge, it won't do anything. And, conveniently, the 1-year warranty ran out 1.5 months ago. The 512MB model I have costs 99 bucks now (it was 110 when I bought it), which is also the amount Apple charges to repair it. I'll take a pass.I was a quick convert to the Apple cult after getting my iBook near the end of the last school year (funded by Becky selling her car.) It's fast and all of the programs are seemlessly integrated. It obeys the first law of personal computing: It Just Works. I'm still a much more proficient Windows (and Linux) hacker than I am an Apple hacker, largely because one rarely has to hack anything to get an Apple computer to work.
HOWEVER: I'm not really a member of the Apple cult, when it comes down to it. My homie Ransom and I passed in the compu-night last year; just as Becky and I were getting Apple laptops, he was ditching his and getting an IBM Thinkpad, on which he loaded Linux. He was utterly sick of his iBook's hard drive dying and having to argue with Apple for weeks to get it replaced. Likewise, our grad lab is stocked with about 8 iMacs and eMacs, half of which Don't Just Work. They won't boot, they boot but they don't get a login prompt, they get a login prompt but won't get on the network, whatever.
The point is that, in my (albeit limited) experience, Apple reliability is not actually much greater than PC reliability. I still love my laptop, but I wouldn't be that surprised if it up and stops working at some point a little while after its warranty runs out (the difference being, I'd definitely have to get it fixed.) Unlike broken PCs, I can't do anything about the broken Macs in the grad lab. And Ransom, he's a smart guy (a smart guy with a CS degree) and he went over to the other side.
Most importantly, now that my shuffle is iBroke, I will be forced to listen to people on the bus. Steve Jobs owes me drinks and a back rub.
5 comments:
I once went into an Apple store 3 years after my 3G iPod broke 2 months out of warranty and bitched my way to a brand new one.
Did you scour the macforums yet? Usually you can try that nonsense to get it to work and 50% of the time it will.
If not, is there a store around here? Maybe I can help...
yeah, look into the tricks. the mac nerds have tricks for these things. also, don't give up on it entirely. my first ipod broke right after the warranty expired and right after I gave it to my brother for Xmas. it wouldn't come off of hold....and then one day, months later, it did. and it works now. i don't trust electronics or computers in general, but I still love macs.
You will have to pry my MacBook from my cold dead hands *looks around for death* I love it so very much. I've been an apple girl since 1983. Yes, you heard correctly, we had the Apple, Apple II, AppleIIC and Apple IIE and the first Macintosh. At work I have a Dell Windows box and it's the bane of my existance.
Another thought...have you opened up your iPod software (not iTunes) and tried to Restore it? I just had to do that with my old old iPod (the big white one that holds 10,000 songs) when it kept getting hung up when I tried to consolidate my library. You might try letting it charge over night and then using the iPod software to see if it can tell you what it's doing - it has some diagnostic stuff.
The Macs in the computer lab at Central in Ellensburg were amazing at rescuing data off my sad little floppy disks before I had CD burning capabilities. By the way, the light in my laptop screen keeps going out and I have to shut it, wait til it goes into standby, then reopen it for the light to come back on. Do you think this will continue to get worse?
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