Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

jmelrose · May 4, 2003, 09:31 AM

G'morning...

As I posted here some time ago, I was opening my iPod in an attempt to do the battery-reviving "Full-total-mother-of-all-ipod-hard-resets" when I made a small break in the ribbon connecting the drive to motherboard. And so, the iPod worked no more.

So, now that I have a lovely not-quite-mint (and currently nonfunctioning) piece of Apple beauty which cost me $500, ddoes anyone know of any options I have to make use of the parts? The headphones are a "duh" and I can probably give my remote to a friend with a 5GB'er, but I guess I am wondering what I'd need to do to even put the 20GB hard drive into a slimline case and use as a portable backup device or something. I'm figuring the case/motherboard/battery/screen are all landfill-bound as they don't have much use other than being ipod parts.

My guess is even if I tried to ebay the parts (the battery and drive might at least do someone some good out there somewhere) Apple legal would pay my email inbox a little visit...

I'd appreciate any thoughts/options folks have to share.,.

Sincerely,
j.Melrose
Gurnee IL

Moose · May 4, 2003, 12:04 PM

Originally posted by jmelrose:
My guess is even if I tried to ebay the parts (the battery and drive might at least do someone some good out there somewhere) Apple legal would pay my email inbox a little visit...

Yeah. They most likely wouldn't. And if they did, feel free to tell them to pound sand. They can't prevent you from selling things you own. Unlike software, where you have purchased (or not, but obtained) just a license to use your copy of the software, an iPod is a tangible object, and you can do whatever you want to with it, as long as you're not violating some law. You would not be violating a law by selling the parts.

Dunno what you'd do with them apart from selling them, though. Ballast?

NeilCharter · May 4, 2003, 05:19 PM

Can't Apple repair it for you? Have you contacted them?

Neil

swsteckly · May 4, 2003, 05:34 PM

I did the exact same thing trying to open my 20GB. I sent it in to apple for service for an 'unknown problem', and apple sent one with refurbished internals and a brand-new outer case (looks like a brand new one) to my door a few days later. I had even left some pry marks in the plastic, but I guess they didn't care.

Shhhhh...

Anomalous · May 4, 2003, 06:52 PM

Originally posted by jmelrose:

My guess is even if I tried to ebay the parts (the battery and drive might at least do someone some good out there somewhere) Apple legal would pay my email inbox a little visit...

I'm not a lawyer (thank goodness!), but I would think that if you own the iPod, you have a right to sell the parts as you see fit.

gatorparrots · May 4, 2003, 07:17 PM

Originally posted by jmelrose:
Uses for a dead ipod?

Clay pigeon.

Agasthya · May 4, 2003, 07:46 PM

Originally posted by gatorparrots:
Clay pigeon.

PULL!

adamberti · May 5, 2003, 02:32 AM

A buddy of mine had a first generation 5 gigger that his brother had given him. Unfourtunatly his brother is a 'pro' skater and this thing had probably been dropped and bashed around and landed on more times than everybody's pods in this forum combined. Needless to say it didnt work quite right - it made a real loud buzzing noise all the time and just wouldnt work. I tried and tried all sorts of things (my friend has a PC with no firewire so it was still useless to him) to make it work - and I had it work for about 5 minutes but then it died again.

We were thinking the same thing as you, what to do? He's in engineering at school, and I like to disassemble stuff, so thats what we did - Completely. We disconnected everything! Took it out of the case, tried to find what was making the loud buzzing noise, took out every screw we could find. It was really cool to see how compact and well designed this thing looked (even though I know nothing of circuitry). I'd never seen inside a hard drive either, so we opened that up and let it run so we could watch it access the hard drive - that was kind of cool. The platter inside the drive is really hard. I couldnt even scratch it. Have you ever seen the iPod show a sad iPod face? Reminds me of the old Macintosh SE/30 I used to have.

Click here to see the full image. It also made a missing Hard Drive icon, but I didnt get that one on camera.

So we played and played, even took the buttons and jog-wheel off of the circuit board - he now has a nice iPod case with no insides. We also learned about lcd's . Then came time for the battery - I'd never seen a battery quite like this before, so I decided to try and 'unwrap' it. I got to a point where it didnt want to unwrap anymore. So silly me, I used my little chisel to just 'lift' the next layer of wrapping. Well it didnt lift so well, I made a nice puncture and some blueish green gas came out with a nice 'phishhhh' type sound and my friend and I promptly left the room and shut the door (my dorm room btw). So then I thought - Hey, I have to sleep in here tonight, I better get rid of that. And we ended up dispossing off all of the insides - even a hard drive cable in perfectly good condition (sorry jmelrose!). I let the room air out for a bit, and then casually continued on doing what I was doing before the dissasembly.

I hope you enjoyed my little story. Anyways, the point is if you cant find anything else to do, it is kinda fun to disassemble it, just skip the battery part for your own sake.