I’m sad to say that my iPod seems to have checked out rather permanently this weekend. Rather suddenly and sadly it no longer provides me with tunes on the bus and at work. I gave it my best shot at fixing it with all of my hard fought geekery (which was really me just sort of smacking it around a bit) but to no avail. To be honest it has seen lots of use, and hardware failures happen, but hey, what are ya gonna do?

One thing I’m sure I won’t do is call Apple to fix it. Since it’s over two years old, it’s well out of warranty. If you follow the online thread and open a repair ticket on the Apple web site, they basically start off by reminding you to confirm your payment information since it’s going to cost about $300 to fix my two year old iPod. Huh? A brand new, bigger, colour one that plays videos (mine doesn’t) is $299. I was so confused that I called Apple to make sure I hadn’t wandered into some crazy land of obviously insane web pages. Nope, that’s the right one, alright. I thanked the helpful Apple person on the phone and carefully closed the browser window without letting them charge my credit card. I have since ordered a refurbished one from the Apple site with a warranty, with a case, for less money than they were going to charge me to fix my old one. That’s just nuts. I’m thinking that they really don’t want that iPod repair business too badly. But then again, where do they get their refurbished units? Am I getting a deal on some poor bastard’s broken new iPod that he sent in for repairs? Is the refurb business even more lucrative since they get to charge twice for the same unit? Am I a sucker no matter how I look at it? Are these questions rhetorical since I went ahead and bought another iPod anyway and it’s already on it’s way? Should I have even purchased another one at all given my cost of ownership for the last one was about $19/month since I bought it. On the plus side, that means that this one only has to last a little over a year for me to get the same ROI.  Finally, am I a huge nerd for obsessing about this?

Go ahead and comment if you have any opinions on this matter, I’m interested to know what both of you think.