System 13

I got my ipodjuice.com battery yesterday, and after reading over the instructions a few times, I jumped right in. A few notes on how it went:

• I found getting the iPod open much more difficult than it appeared in their tutorial video. I suppose that’s to be expected; it was the first time I’d ever done it, and the video is one of their technicians, who probably sits around popping iPods open all day. They’re certainly not kidding when they say the iOpener tool is sharp; I actually cut one of my fingers when trying to push it into the iPod, and it slipped. Ow.
• The power connection was, as they remarked in the instructions, very tight. I was quite concerned that instead of unplugging the old battery, I was instead going to rip a chunk off of the iPod motherboard. After about 20 minutes of fighting it, I really pulled hard, harder than I wanted to. It popped right out. For those of you who have installed PCI cards or memory sticks in computers, the experience was similar. “I don’t really want to push this hard on the memory stick, because I’m afraid I’m going to break the motherboard…” But alas, you have to, otherwise the stick won’t go in. Same thing, just going the other direction.
• In the instructions, you’re told to use a flat-head screwdriver to pry out the old battery. You’re also told to “not be alarmed if you hear the old glue cracking.” In my case, the instructions should have read “do be alarmed when the old glue finally breaks after much prying, the battery pops out, and your screwdriver veers dangerously close to destroying the iPod motherboard.” That was indeed an “oh shit!” moment. Luckily, nothing was broken.
• Getting the iPod open and getting the old battery out were the hardest parts. Once those two things were done, the rest was relatively easy. Plugging in the new battery was infinitely easier than unplugging the old one. I had some trouble arranging the power cable on top of the hard drive, as I wasn’t able to wedge it back under the motherboard, but I finally figured it out. Snapping the iPod back together was easy, and I was happy to find that having it open hadn’t made the edges weird or anything – running my finger over it, I can just barely feel the seam between white plastic and the metal, just as before.

After snapping it back together, I was very happy to hit the power and see the Apple icon show up. Even with my wild screwdriver, I didn’t break anything. I really thought that that might have been the end to my iPod.

I’ve not really had long enough to thoroughly test how long the battery works, but I charged it for a few hours after putting it in, and have listened to a fair bit of language learning stuff, and it’s still showing a full charge. I’ll post later on about my findings, but all in all, I’m happy. I can already tell it’s going to at least be lasting longer than the old battery, and I saved some money in doing it myself rather than shipping it off to Apple. Not to mention I don’t have to redownload all of my stuff to it…

And, just to make it abundantly clear: no, the ipodjuice.com folks didn’t pay me, I’m just a (mostly) happy customer. My right index finger still hurts like hell, however. But hey, they warned me.