Mike's Weblog

Recently iTunes 7 was released promising lots of great new features and widgets. After having been harassed by iTunes 6 for a week to upgrade, I finally gave in. It was sluggish at first, but the new features seemed to be worth it. Worth it, that is, until iTunes 7 decided to kill my 2 month old refurbished iPod Shuffle.

I had just downloaded some video file at work and wanted to view it at home. It was under 100mb, so I thought “no problem, there’s plenty of room on my shuffle”. I plugged it in, iTunes came up and wanted to upgrade the firmware. Having never had problems with their firmware before, I let it fire away. The upgrade seemed to go fine, but windows could no longer access the iPod Shuffle. I wrote it off to a temporary issue, copied the file to a compact flash card I had handy, and went home.

Today I tried to get to the bottom of it. I plugged the iPod into a different computer, and saw the same results. Windows doesn’t even see it on the storage manager! I read through the apple support forums and proceeded to install iTunes 7 on my home computer to ‘reset’ my iPod Shuffle. iTunes proceeded to automatically analyze my whole music library before I could use it to fix my Shuffle. About an hour later, it was done and I could now proceed with the attempt to fix my iPod via a ‘reset’. The reset failed.

At this point I was beginning to get concerned. I executed the obvious search on the popular search engines available and became even more concerned. The search ‘iTunes 7 kills ipods’ on Google as a blog about my very problem as the first result! Keep in mind that iTunes 7 has only been released for a few weeks! Many others are having the same problem that I am having.

The next step was to request a warranty repair from Apple. Their website’s automated system complains that my Shuffle is beyond its warranty. Could this be due to its refurbished nature? I’m going to have to fax them my receipt, which Winnie luckily kept track of, in order to hope for a replacement (which will hopefully not die also).

Now I'm in a situation where I may, or may not, have my ipod fixed. My iTunes library has already been upgraded to the new format. And, I'm afraid to sync my G2 ipod for fear that it will also die.

Apple (just in case you read this): This is very disappointing.

I stole the picture from digital-lifestyles.info.

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