My fourth...

...iPod, that is.
Without any intention to do so, I had to pick up my 4th iPod last night.

A true Mac convert, I have been very loyally following every new movements Apple comes up with.

At work, I use a PowerBook G4 15", zero complain. The performance is great, the look is sleek, the capacity is applaudable. I am into my 3rd year of using it and it still outdoes my colleague's other platform-based computers.

At home, I use a black MacBook Intel Core 2 Duo 13", except with a battery drainage incident that occurred in January, zero complain. Granted it is still less than 1 year since I bought Tony Mac, I sure hope that I don't have any complains yet.

And the ever-growing peripheral collection at my house is slowly turning it into a Apple Store look a like.

And I carry my iPod everywhere... or at least on the days that it's working.


... my iPod sad stories

I bought my 60 GB Photo iPod a couple of years ago. Back then, the 60 GB iPod Photo was the IT thing to have. It's got the color display, it has photo slide shows, it's definitely the thing to have.
The shop dude told me that I could keep 20,000 songs in it (at the moment I have uploaded only 4,000 songs) and although a little bulky compared to the now ultra-slim iPod Video, I am completely happy with the purchase.

Until September 2007 when it suddenly exploded.
I kid you not, it really exploded. *PHUFF* like that.
In the middle of pedaling over to DiviDong's apartment for drinks, I was listening to Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder's "Just good friends". They went, "We've got a problem here, I....." then suddenly the song stopped playing. I reached over to my iPod to replay it only to realize the machine was HOT. It was burning, and it was making a very funny buzzing noise. "Weird!" I thought. I couldn't turn it off and it kept on making that buzzing noise, until suddenly it went *PHUFF*.

This then generated a subsequent trip to Shibuya's Apple Store. The Genius Bar dude checked my warranty and then asked me to sign a few forms and then gave me a new one, the exact same model.

The iPod was OK for a couple of weeks until suddenly the dream machine only piped the sound to my left earphone. Initially I thought the earphone was the problem, so I bought a new one. And then the new one also still had the same problem, so then I thought that maybe my right ear is having a problem. Nah.
What bothered me was because the problem occurred 2 weeks after the iPod got replaced, surely there was something wrong with how I operate the iPod. But then, it was really puzzling, I mean... how hard is it to operate an iPod, you know what I mean?
Later that day, I discovered that the earphone jack was having some contact problem. So my solution was to tape a scotch tape to hold the connection. But this also didn't solve the problem since the taping got lose every time I went jogging with my iPod on.

So, I went back to the Apple Store. They took some measures to it and discovered (and apologized profusely) that the earphone jack was not in a prime condition. Hellooooo?!
They gave me another new one.

Now, that was back in October. Since then I've been using it, with only some minor problems. Namely, it froze every now and then or it skipped songs and stuff. Until last Friday, I was listening to Carlos Nuñez's Polka de Karnoëd.

It felt like a déjà vu .

The song stopped in the middle of the first verse.

The buzzing started.

The buzzing continued for some time, and then...

It exploded.

Again.

*PHUFF*.

Again.

I had always thought that maybe the machine didn't like my Michael Jackson songs, but when this happened to my cherished Carlos Nuñez's collection (I have nearly 100 songs by him and I play 32 of the works at least 1,000 times already), I realized that maybe whatever is wrong is in the iPod Photo 60 GB series, not in the songs. There must be a bug or something that gave problems ONLY to this particular series.

Last night I brought the fated iPod to the Apple Store, again. And they did the one thing they know best: gave me yet another replacement.
When I brought my concerns up to them, they refuse to believe my suspicion. Although agreeing that for one person to have gone through 4 iPod changes in less than 2 years is plenty, they can't offer anything beyond this service.

Maybe the 4th is the charmed one. I only hope if anything is going to happen to this 4th one that it should happen before September 1, 2007 - that's when my warranty expires. Amen.