TORONTO — The holidays are nearing, and the iPod — with its iconic white earphones — will no doubt top many a wish list.
But odds are that many iPods sitting under the Christmas tree this year will be in the trash by next — partly because of Apple Computer Inc.'s strategy of frequently rolling out new players and partly because, like all electronics, they've been known to break.
At any given time there are hundreds of busted iPods up for grabs on EBay, their owners anxious to recoup a few dollars for a now useless piece of hardware.
The unending supply of broken iPods even triggered a business idea for 26-year-old Matt Bremner, who now makes his living repairing and reselling the mini-jukeboxes.
“They are great machines, everyone who has one loves them,” said Bremner, an Apple fan who owns an iPod Nano and iPod Video.
“But they're pretty much made to be replaced every year. The average life of an iPod is maybe two years, but a lot of them start breaking after the (one-year) warranty expires.”
While Apple has sold 70 million units and has legions of devotees, the iPod has also received unfavourable attention for problems that have been known to kill the pricey gadgets — including screens that break, batteries that fade, damaged headphone jacks that distort sound, and failing hard drives.
In rare cases, some iPods were even sold with a virus.
Bremner started with a modest Internet-based mail-order company and saw business grow large enough to fund an IRepair.ca storefront in downtown Toronto, where he repairs hundreds of iPods every month.
Popular sites like appledefects.com, iPodsdirtysecret.com and 1418hell.com attack Apple for the iPod's supposed shortcomings.
The brand new iPod Shuffle, released earlier this month, has already produced at least one very unhappy customer, who has posted online about how the belt clip on his player bent in such a way that it's now impossible to recharge the battery.
The website 1418hell.com was recently launched to focus attention on “error code 1418,” which may have hit “thousands” of iPods after running a software update, rendering them unusable. Apple has since responded with a fix but the website seeks to hold the company “widely accountable for their appalling software release and customer service.”
There's no shortage of horror stories about iPods breaking down, but it's not necessarily a reflection of the product's quality, said Toronto-based technology expert Andy Walker of cyberwalker.com, who instead thinks it's indicative of the iPod's relatively early stages of evolution.
“It's an extremely well-engineered product that has its flaws, but its product design is moving into its third or fourth generation and they've knocked out a lot of the bugs,” Walker said.
“Given what you get and what you pay for, it's a pretty darn good product, and that's why it sells.”
He compares the lifespan of iPods to cellphones, and said Apple probably hopes users come to assume they'll only get a couple of years out of their MP3 player.
“The average cellphone lifespan is 18 months and the cellphone industry knows that, and in fact, they trade on it and they expect their consumers to trade up the phones,” Walker said.
“I gotta think Apple is making them cheap and fast and they've got to have an internal (estimate) that says, ‘This product is going to have a shelf life of X years, and the average iPod owner will change their iPod within a certain frequency,' “ he said.
Apple, meanwhile, argues that more often than not, iPods die because of misuse and not any internal flaw.
“Consumer abuse is an issue ... so we try to make our product as rugged as possible,” said Willi Powell, a strategic development manager with Apple Canada, adding that problems with dying batteries are simply a limitation of the technology.
“If you're a very, very heavy music listener, if you listen to music all the time, like every day, and you find yourself charging it every day, the batteries do have a known life cycle” of roughly 500 charges before dying, he said.
Such information is not likely to discourage network administrator Paresh Pandya, 31, of Toronto.
He is Apple's dream customer, having owned four different iPods at the same time — a standard, Photo, Nano and Shuffle.
Pandya said he upgrades regularly because drops in price and the iPod's resale value have made it viable.
“Originally I thought it was expensive but in this last generation they've really improved upon the price to the point it's almost like a disposable item now,” he said.
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