iPod Woes

Last night, I finally had some time to help my younger son with his iPod. He wanted to put some more movies on it. I didn't think that would be such a big deal.

When we connected his iPod to iTunes, it told us that there was a software update available. We decided to update his iPod software from 1.0.3 to 1.1. No big deal.

My son watched patiently as the update downloaded (we have a pretty darned slow DSL connection here) and it said that it was installing.

That's when his iPod died.

DEAD. Bricked. No response to anything. We tried the 5 r's on Apple's support site. It didn't respond AT ALL. Nothing.

The poor boy was in tears. I could only hug him and wipe away the tears and tell him that he did NOTHING wrong.

After he went to bed, I Googled and searched around on Apple's support site and put in a trouble ticket and almost made an appointment at the Genius Bar at the Gatweay. I fiddled and tried to reset it over and over and over. I got nothing but a small flash of something on the screen, then more blackness. I played with it until almost 1:00 in the morning. I woke up the next morning fretting about it and feeling terrible for him.

This afternoon, I looked a little closer at some discussion threads on Apple's support forums. It turns out that others were having the same problem directly after updating to version 1.1. Some of these "bricked" iPods actually seemed to "reset" themselves when left alone and unplugged. They finally ran completely out of battery and went through a cold boot process which woke them up again.

I put the "dead" iPod to my ear and heard a high-pitched sound coming from it. It was apparently still "on," just completely unresponsive. I told my son what I had read and we decided to just let it sit for 24 hours and see if it would come back.

A few minutes after he went to bed, he came running downstairs to tell me that his iPod had suddenly lit up in the blackness of his bedroom! We went up and got it and it was telling us to connect it to a power supply. After we connected it, the much-hoped-for Apple logo appeared, the update status bar came up, we watched the update happen, and his iPod came back from the brink. It's working perfectly again. My son is, understandably, having a hard time getting back to sleep because he's so excited and happy.

Lessons learned:

1. Sometimes, patience pays off.
2. Sometimes, it sucks to be a kid and feel things so deeply.
3. Sometimes, it's awesome to be a kid and feel things so deeply.
4. Sometimes, I wish I could be a kid again.