well, foo.

My trusty 40 gig iPod has begun making little clicky noises and not playing music any more. Or booting.

It is 13 days out of warranty. The web page won't let me open a service call on it without paying. In ten minutes, I will call Apple's support group and see if I can get them to fix it anyway, since it's so close to the ending time (and it only arrived around the 25th of September of last year, so I've only had it a year and a couple of days).

The bonus irony here is that the iPod adaptor for my new car is arriving via UPS today. It's a nice one, and supports control of the iPod from the stereo front-panel controls.

I've spent quite a lot of time encouraging people to go lean on Apple for slightly-out-of-warranty support. I think it's even mostly worked out for them. Guess it's now my turn...

If it's time for me to get a new iPod, I will be very grumpy. I'm mostly attempting to conserve funds for the sake of plane tickets for Christmas vacation. Of course, making a long flight without some kind of portable music would be very painful. (And I don't want to use my laptop as The Expensive Music Player, either, although I'll be taking movies to watch again, for sure.) I wish they still had a size between 20 gig and 60 gig, although I've seen the research that, I'm sure, led them to those sizes. (Most people have about 500 tracks total, while the real enthusiasts, like me, have zillions. Thus, you can cut costs and support everyone by providing only smallish and very large players and not even worrying about middle sizes.)

Anyway, I guess I'll find out.

and the answer is...

...I don't have to pay for hardware repair, but I do have to pay for the shipping. No big deal-- I can certainly handle that.

The moral of this story is that if you're reasonably polite and only a couple of days out of warranty, Apple is pretty decent about service.

"Is there somebody else I could talk to who could help with this?" is a good way to ask... Demanding only annoys support people, as does saying, "Can I talk to your supervisor?" Make it sound like they can do you a favor and be a good person by helping you and, if they can, they'll generally do so.

Apple's second-tier support hold music is some kind of instrumental electronic stuff. Sounds very late-80's/early-90's. Too much 808-style clap, but very mellow. Lots of DX7 FM bells and electric piano and flabby sampled drum machine. I bet it's all DX7 and TR707...