Replacing the Battery in my iPod

David Weintraub (apparently) - 09:26am Nov 5, 2004 PST
via email

I just finished replacing my battery in my iPod and thought I'd share
my experience. For the last year, my iPod has been having a harder and
harder time holding a charge. When I first got it, I would listen to it
for about 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the evening on my
commute without problems. After a while, I brought my plug-in charger
to work because it wouldn't last all day. Then it got to a point where
it couldn't hold enough of a charge to last the 30 minute exercise
routine I was doing.

I got a battery from Laptops for Less (which has a URL
<http://www.ipodbattery.com>). The price was reasonable (pretty much in
line with the other places on the Web), it had a webpage that demoed
how easy it was to change batteries
(<http://www.ipodbattery.com/slimipodinstall.htm>), and it promised
instructions for battery installation.

I like to think of myself as a fairly handy guy and I've had some
experience with replacing hard drives, memory, power supplies, etc. on
computers, so I wasn't overly concerned about the operation.

Two days after my order, I received a small package with my battery, a
tool for opening my iPod (a small cheap screw driver), and
"instructions" (a printed copy of the webpages I've already seen). I
looked at the battery and noticed how small it really was. It was
smaller than a business card and almost as thin. Considering that this
battery was actually 33% "larger" than the original battery, I was
impressed.

Next came time for the operation. I turned the switch on top of my iPod
to the locked position, so I wouldn't turn it on and off while
attempting to reassemble it (a recommendation I read on another web
page). I prepped the area by cleaning the surface and scrubbed my
hands, took the measuring tape to measure six centimeters, and then
froze. The directions didn't mention whether you measure six
centimeters from the top or bottom. I looked at the iPod for some clue,
but found none. Not only that, but the screwdriver they gave me was too
wide for the job. Fortunately, I had a jeweler's screwdriver and
started prying.

The prying proved more difficult than I originally thought. I finally
figured out that I wasn't suppose to pry the edges apart as much as
sticking the blade up into the seam and pulling the bottom of the case
away from the top. Once I got the first placed pried apart, the rest of
the iPod came apart with no problems.

Once the case was open, the rest was pretty easy. I was a little
nervous about handling the connectors and whether I'd be able to
reconnect them, but they proved even easier to work with than the
AirCard slot in the Mac. I did take some time to admire the drive that
was in the blue rubber padding. When I first worked with computers in
the late 1970s, the "Winchester" drives were the state of the art hard
drive. They weighed 75 pounds and held somewhere between 5 MB and 10
MB of data, and here this tiny wisp of metal was something that held
4000 times that.

I tested the iPod, turned it off, put it back together, and nothing...
The directions failed to mention the external locking switch on top of
the iPod had to be aligned with an internal switch electrical switch. I
had to reopen my iPod and align those two parts. Fortunately, opening
the iPod back up proved much easier this time than the first. The iPod
literally snaps back together, and the whole "operation" took under 30
minutes.

Now, my iPod's battery lasts about 8 hours per charge which is longer
than it did when I first got it. The whole experience was relatively
painless, and the only evidence of the operation is a small nick in the
plastic of the iPod case where I first attempted to "pry" the case
apart. The total cost was less than $40 (which included tax and
shipping).

--
David Weintraub
davidweintraubworld.net
davidweintraub.name