Apple Bashing!

My iPod died last night. It started showing the sad iPod icon which made me sad as well. Now I am not a big fan of apple, and I don’t feel the need for buying every iteration of iPods that have come since I got mine. I have a 4th generation 20GB iPod with click wheel. This was the one that came before the iPod photo or those video ones never mind the touch. I don’t care much about videos nor music, my primary purpose for the iPod is listening to podcasts.

My commutes for work have been very long in the last couple of years. Before I used to drive for an hour, now my train rides are close to two hours each way. I needed to make this time productive and podcasts seemed like a reasonable way to utilize the time. These podcasts allow me to stay up to date with things that I would otherwise not have any time for. Now the iPod was dead and I had nothing to occupy myself on the train. There is only so many minutes of looking out of the window that I can do.

Now we come to how the iPod came to this sad state. This made me hate Apple even more. The program I hate the most on my computer is iTunes and from what I hear, I am not alone in that. It is so bloated and takes forever to load and is so hard to do anything in it. I had plugged in my iPod and iTunes just crashed after that. It was very weird as the program became all black and it wouldn’t even end when I tried to end task it. Fortunately enough I was able to keep my machine alive and end iTunes by first killing the explorer process and then killing iTunes. As much as people say bad things about Vista, I love it and I have never had it crash on me ever and I have always been able to recover from critical errors to my native state. And people love to bash Microsoft and love apple because it is trendy.

I needed something for my morning commute and fortunately enough my reliable G1 could download an app called ACast which could subscribe to and download podcasts over the air. Google came to the rescue once again. Now I was able to listen to Sidepodcast and find out how the KERS development has been going along for the upcoming season of Formula 1. I could also listen to Buzz Out Loud and get all the tech news of the day.

But the story does not end there. The apple website did not provide much support for the sad iPod icon other than taking it in for service. I was not willing to spend that kind of money on my 4th generation iPod. So relying on Google once again, I searched and discovered that many people had fixed this problem by dropping the iPod from a height of 4-5 feet. Yes I kid you not, that was the solution everyone was saying, and they were just as amazed at the outcome. I had nothing to lose so I decided to give it a try. Now I tried it on a carpeted floor and dropped the iPod from a height of 4 feet. It hit the ground and then I turned it on to see that the sad iPod icon was no more. The menu had returned. The iPod is fully functional now. Just goes to show that Apple products need a good bashing to make them work.