For Christmas Jamie got me a nice 40gb 4G refurb Apple iPod because I had been asking for an iPod to listen to while I drove to work. It was great for a while, sure it wasn’t a brand spanking new video iPod but I didn’t really need that. I mostly wanted something that had a lot of storage because I have a lot of mp3s. Well it was great for a little while, then one day I got the dreaded sad iPod icon. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to mail it back to Apple or take it to a store, finally after some deliberation I took it to a local Apple store.

By now I hadn’t used the iPod for a few weeks but I had tried to turn it on randomly to see if it magically fixed itself, obviously it hadn’t. However as soon as I pulled into the parking lot of the mall where the Apple store was it magically turned on. Cursing my stupid luck I took it into the store nonetheless and had the tech look at it. He said there wasn’t much he could do beside restore it and start a case number because it was most likely going to fail sometime soon.

That sometime soon was about a week and a half later. It died one afternoon and I decided to take it back to the same store that night to get it replaced.

This time a different tech looked at the iPod and instantly knew it was dead. He went into the back and handed me a new iPod, but by new it was probably a refurb since they stopped making the 4G’s quite a while ago. That wasn’t that important to me so long as it worked.

Well it didn’t work, at least for too long. I managed to get it home and power on without issue. I charged it up all night and set off in the morning to put some mp3s on it so I could listen to something at work. That didn’t go so well with the iPod crapping out after transferring about 200mb of music. It gave me the “Cannot write to Thierry Henry (my iPod’s name), please check disk”. I ran windows CHKDSK and it came up empty handed. However I was still able to connect the iPod to my computer and see it so I tried restoring it.

The restore went fine but again I couldn’t write to it. So I went to work and setup another appointment at the Apple store that night. This time I went in the same tech from the night before was in there. I told him how I was in last night and the iPod I was given was already broke. He thought it was odd and said he’d go in the back and look for a new one for me.

He returned about 10 minutes later with one and as soon as he put the box on the GeniusBar I asked him “If this one breaks would there be any possible way I could get maybe a free upgrade toa 30GB Video iPod?”

He replied with “These usually don’t break that much so I wouldn’t really worry about it.”

Fair enough answer I thought and started to sign the paper saying that I had received a new ipod blahblahblah. As I was signing I tried turning on the iPod to make sure it worked.

Sure enough within seconds the iPod was showing the sad iPod icon. I turned the iPod to the tech and said, “Well this one’s broken already.”

He looked a little exasperated and said, “That was the last one in the store.” Then pausing and saying “Let me talk to my manager and see what I can do.”

I wasn’t sure what exactly that ment but fair enough. He returned a few minutes later and informed me that they’d be giving me a brand new 80GB Video iPod for free because of my troubles and that it’d come with a new 1-year AppleCare Warranty.

I was amazed, sure I might’ve thought they would’ve given me a 30GB, but never did I think they’d give me an 80GB 5.5G iPod. Needless to say I was happier than a pig in shit and it goes to show that again Apple isn’t necessarily always thinking about their bottom dollar when dealing with companies and is instead usually thinking about their customer.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 16th, 2007 at 11:30 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.