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Apple Archive

Is Apple's $99 iPod Battery Replacement Fee Fair or a Rip Off?

- 2003.11.21

Apple is now offering a battery replacement service on all older-model iPods. Is it worth doing, or does it make more sense to replace your two year old iPod?

You bought a 5 GB iPod a couple months after it came out, and up until now it's worked great. Sure, it may have a few scratches on it, and the original headphones may have worn out, but it still plays your music and works every bit as well as it did the day you got it. Except for one thing - over the past year or so battery life has been decreasing.

The original capacity of the iPod's battery was pretty good. When I first bought mine, I remember that it had no problem dealing with an eight hour plane trip from JFK in New York to Heathrow in London. It even lasted for a two hour drive after we got there. I was impressed, but how about now?

Battery life in my iPod is still pretty good; no where near as bad as what some people are experiencing. I can get through a six hour plane trip to Los Angeles, Cal. and an hour drive beforehand. After that, the battery's only got a bit less than an hour left on it. Not quite the ten hours of two years ago, but almost eight hours is still fairly respectable.

What about the new service Apple is offering? They'll replace the battery in your old iPod for $99, giving you back that awesome ten hour battery life.

They're doing this because they're being nice, right? Of course not; they're probably making a killing on it, because $99 is still cheaper than a used 5 GB iPod (which usually sell for around $125 on eBay it seems), and definitely cheaper than a new one.

There's clearly a market for this type of service now that iPod batteries are starting to show their age, and Apple has decided to take advantage of it.

But does it make sense to spend $100 on a two year old digital music player that is heavier than the newer models and has a relatively limited capacity? If my iPod's battery were to die, I think I'd look into buying a whole new iPod. I'd have the advantage of the other parts being newer and subject to no previous use, plus the larger capacity and smaller size.

Of course, if you can't afford that (not that I can really either) - and can bear it - there's always the good old fashioned portable cassette player. I've got my Walkman WM-1 around here somewhere. While it's about four times the size of the iPod, the batteries are always replaceable with four standard AA size batteries.

I suppose a couple years of buying batteries would probably buy you a new iPod, though.

Then there's always the DIY (Do It Yourself) way. For $49, that's a full $50 less than what Apple wants to charge you, you can buy a battery from www.ipodbattery.com to fit your iPod and replace it yourself. They even include illustrated instructions, and it looks extremely simple.

It'll make you think how crazy Apple is to charge $50 to install the battery, and if you don't mind spending a few minutes doing it, it may work out to be a pretty good deal for you. In fact, forget the $99 Apple thing - go for this and have a friend install it if you have to. You can use that $50 to buy your friend and yourself a dinner out; what an excellent way of saying "thank you for replacing my iPod's battery and saving me $50."

You could do that, that is, if you haven't already bought one of the new iPods, where the play, forward and backward buttons light up in orange. The cool factor of that alone may be reason enough to spend the extra $250. Or maybe not.

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