Apple’s iPod has been around since late October, 2001, and has since then saturated the market with well over 60 million units worldwide. With so many units in circulation, countless problems have arisen over the years, and getting the thing repaired can be almost as expensive as buying a new one. I recently got my hands on two iPods that Apple customer support deemed beyond repair, but yet I managed to fix them and pretty easily, I might add.

Case One

The first iPod I got to fix had died after about a month of use. This iPod was actually one that my friend, Natalie, had received from Apple after she had sent in her first one because it, too, had stopped working. A few weeks after she had sent in her first iPod, she received a replacement fourth generation iPod at no cost to her, since the incident occurred under warranty. This second iPod stopped working after a mere month of use, after which it started displaying the infamous dead iPod symbol. At this point the warranty had run out, and so had her patience with Apple.

A few weeks ago a couple of friend and I were talking about portable entertainment and this issue with the iPod came up. After hearing about the problem and that the warranty had expired, I asked her if could get my hands on it to tinker with. Since it was already dead, she didn’t have much more to lose, so she handed it to me a few days later.

Case Two

Upon hearing that I was busy trying to fix an iPod for a friend, another friend of mine came up to me and asked if I would be willing to take a look at his iPod as well, since it had failed to function correctly as well.

He told me that his third generation iPod would power on, and that the hard drive would start to spin, but would then stop, start back up again, stop, and so on, until it finally displayed the same error symbol as Natalie’s iPod.

I told him that I would take a look at his iPod as well, but that I could not guarantee anything, since this problem sounded far more severe than the first. Initially, I expected the hard drive to be corrupt, since it behaved awkwardly, but the answer turned out to be a lot simpler than that.

Opening an iPod

No matter that the cause of the malfunction was I would have needed to open up the iPods in either case to figure out if I could do anything to remedy the devices.

It would turn out that the hardest part of fixing these two devices would end up being getting them open without scratching or otherwise damaging them. So, after a little research, I came up with the following procedure, which at took some time the first time through, but I quickly got the hang of it with the second one.

The white top of the iPod case is made out of acrylic and the base is obviously a metal, probably aluminum. Both of these materials are not exactly what you might call scratch resistance — as many of you have probably figured out by now. The two case components are attached to each other with a series of hooks that extend out from the acrylic top and latch onto a matching set of metal clips. So, in order to open the iPods, the hooks needed to be pushed inward slightly in order the separate them from their counterparts.

So as to not scratch the edges of either the base or the top, it is crucial to use a thin, soft plastic tool, like a guitar pick or an (old) credit card, to carefully split apart the two case components, before going in with the big guns. After the guitar pick was inserted, I moved it back and forth a couple of times along the edge of the iPod to create a very slight separation between the base and top. Next, move the plastic tool to the bottom of the iPod and get out a sturdier tool with which to actually start opening the enclosure. I opted to use the flat head screwdriver tool on my Leatherman Super Tool, because, unlike most of the screwdrivers that I had lying around, it had a very flat, broad tip, making it ideal for the task.

Insert the screwdriver, or whatever tool you deem fit, into the split created by the guitar pick and push down slowly and carefully as shown in the pictures below. If you are going to try this yourself, then make sure that you are actually in between the acrylic hook and the metal clip, and not in between the clip and the metal base, as you will bend the metal base out of shape this way. Again, look at the pictures to see what I mean.

After carefully pushing down, I eventually heard a pop, which was the hook slipping loose from under the clip and part of the acrylic top coming loose. After this it was be pretty easy to repeat the procedure and actually open up the iPod in its entirety. Be careful once the iPod is open, as some parts of the internal components are actually mounted on the metal base and you wouldn’t want to tear apart the connection between the two.

The Fix

As it turned out, both of the iPods had the same problem, and thus required the same fix. The cable that connected the 1.8” Toshiba hard drive to the motherboard was loose in both instances. It wasn’t immediately obvious, but upon careful examination it turned out that the cable in Natalie’s iPod (the one from the first case) was not in deep enough for any of the pins to make a decent connection. In the second case, the pins on the very same cable were only partially disconnected, which allowed for the hard drive to receive enough information to start up, but not enough information to do anything else, which explained its erratic behavior.

I was astonished at how easy the problem was to fix and how easily the entire problem could have been avoided on Apple’s end with a little design modification. Since the iPod was intended to be a portable entertainment device, one would think that Apple would have thought of properly securing the major components inside the enclosure. By simply adding another hook and clip to the cable and hard drive cable, like is done on many internal power supply cables for PCs, the problem could have been avoided.

Obviously, most people aren’t aware of exactly how fragile their iPods are – the Nano and the Shuffle being less of a problem, as they employ flash memory instead of actual hard drives, which use vulnerable moving parts. I have seen countless people actually run and jog with their full sized iPods. Such activity simply cannot be good for the hard drive and, as it turns out, for the cables connecting the hard drive to the rest of iPod.