New Ipod's and battery life.
 

I bought an Ipod about 1.5 years ago and am convinced that I got one with a bad battery. After a few months of use I was lucky to get an entire cd of playing time on a full charge. I was sure to charge it fully the first time and treated it pretty well throughout.

Did Apple ever address this problem successfully? I'm looking to get my brother one for Xmas but will hold out if the battery is still known to lose so much life.

Thanks for any info.
-T

PS: This is for the regular 20/40 gig Ipods, not the mini or the Photo.

Please, do yourself and your brother a favor, don't buy another iPod.
I recommend iRiver.
there's been posts about mp3 players here and here..
check them out. I personally don't like iPod.

Person: "Hey, there's a problem wtih my Chevy"
Mechanic: "Do yourself a favor and don't buy those. I reccommend a Honda."

LOL...

/seconds MrSelfDestruct

Ipods are just fine, and iRiver has their fair share of defects as well, just like any other commercially produced item will.

Oh... and to answer the original question... Apple has worked on the issue but battery life remains sketchy on ipods. Of course, the new generation hasn't been out for 1.5 years yet, so we'll see how these 4th Generation Ipods work out.

How are you encoding? The battery life specification is based on a 128 kbps filerate. The iPod fills the buffer, then uses that to play the songs. When the buffer empties, it reads from the HD again to refill the buffer. (This is oversimplified.)

If you are encoding uncompressed or lossless, the iPod has to read from the HD much more frequently, and if the file itself is larger than the buffer, it has to read from the HD constantly. This will kill your battery life.

Hope that helped?

I have a 3 year old 5gb original ipod and it sitll gets around 8 hours of battery life. So it's obviously not all of them that have these issues. I wouldn't worry too much about it, apple just recently recalled alot of their powerbook batteries for being bad, and i'm sure if theres enough evidence of this in ipods they will do the same.

If you're even slightly handy aftermarket replacement battery packs are available. Lessens the pain, not that I'd call a replacement pack in 18mo painful.

Along with iPod you get a great community of users and aftermarket products. None of the competition comes close, nor are they likely to for at least the next year. Sony or MS will get some traction eventually but they're hardly approaching the gate.

OK, ok, maybe I am anti everything apple..
buttt I do persist; iPod is way overrated. So for his bro I was just recommending another brand. I am concious every product has defects, but theres a big number of them in the apple iPod.

biz, I know they're hyped & on every corner but borrow one for a weekend if you can. They rock. The controls are so much more obvious than the others I've tried. Setting up playlists & moving through everything is smooooth. Now if I can just get my camera/ipod/palm/cell in one device...

the new batteries seem to work pretty well
the more you skip around, the faster it dies of course
otherwise it holds out for a good 10 - 12 hours @ 192 kbps
seems pretty tough to replace batteries in the new ones, it's all packed in there tight

but this is after only a few months. i can't vouch for the extended life yet.

my only complaint is that other players seem to have more playback/playlist features

There are strong rumors of Apple and Motorola releasing something music/phone related in the first half of 2005.

Yep, I've heard those plans, and god knows Motorola could use the boost, but hasn't the next great convergence solution been just around the corner since '95? :) For this year I'm probably settling back with my iPod & switching phone & pda for a Treo 6x0. Fairly nice execution from the little I've toyed with them. /endhijack

Heh, I didn't say it was a good idea, just that it was out there. If everything is in the same device, what happens when you lose it?

Last tech item I lost was a phone in 98. On the other hand I drop something every week or two from juggling too many of the blasted things. That's chalked up two phone deaths and one palm. If I lose an all-in-one I'll buy another and restore, and rationalize that the new owner at least has a cool toy.

Thanks for all of the personal feedback guys. The only thing is that my brother is pretty set on an Ipod for now. I'd probably look into something else if it were for me.

So are there any preventive measures that can be made to hopefully not hurt the battery life? Redlemon mentioned encoding but I'm not sure what that means. I just ripped songs, imported them into Itunes, then shootthem to the Ipod. And if the battery does get bad, will he be able to send it to Apple or an 'aftermarket' company to have it replaced for well under $100?

Thanks again
-T

If that is the case, you are probably using iTune's default settings, and are encoding at 128 kbps. Go to Preferences/Importing to see what you are importing, or in iTunes turn on the Bit Rate column.

Thanks again Redlemon. So are you saying to make sure it's still at 128kbps?

I use 128 kbps for the AACs. For MP3, you probably want 192 kbps, but certainly no more than 320 kbps. I don't believe there is any reason to use lossless on an iPod.

Replacement batteries can be self installed, not that big of a deal. Can be had depending on model and capacity for anywhere from 25 to 40 dollars.

They are found at http://www.macsales.com, whom I recommend, I have multiple dealings with them and have always been pleased.

They carry batteries for 1G 2G and 3G

1G as in for the one gig model or does 1G, 2G, and 3G stand for something else?

Actually, I believe that this refers to 1st generation, 2nd generation and 3rd generation iPods. Each time a new iPod is released, its considered a different generation.

As for the battery life of the new iPods, i've found it to be much improved from the previous generation iPods. I used to get about 7 hours out of my 3rd generation iPod, and now I get about 12 hours with shuffle on.

Thanks for the clairification ;) I'm tempted to buy a replacement battery for my Ipod now. I wonder how hard the DIY is.

from what i understand the DIY is tricky but doable... i'd recommend it if your battery is that bad... The ipod is alright I guess but I'd sooner get an iriver, i'm not a huge fan of apple products.

Cool, I'll do a little searching on the intranet; I'm sure plenty of DIY battery replacement how-to's have spawned with the coming of the Ipod :crazy:

Not sure how valid it all is but when the whole iPods suck because of their batteries thing started a little over a year ago Apple was using old tech (liquid LiON maybe?) and have since switched to a gel. This new gel battery is fully buzzword compliant (no charge-memory etc.) I've had two a 3G (around 18 Months old) which my wife still uses almost daily, although only to do 90 minute Yoga practices and the bar barely drops. My 4G is great and I use it for an entire day at school (usually one earbud in during all lectures) and have over a half bar when I get in my car to drive home.

As far as the defects I'd say the iPods get more press just as Window's security flaws do. Since 9 out of 10 mp3 players sold this holiday are iPods (as per the NY Times or Wall Street Journal check slashdot if you care) of course you're going to hear more about their problems. The Mac has just as many security holes as windows there is just 100 times more PCs than Macs so they get the news time.

Search over, from macsales, a pdf detailing the replacement for 1G and 2G

http://eshop.macsales.com/Tech/manua...dbattery72.pdf

for the 3G:

http://eshop.macsales.com/Tech_Cente...s/3gipod72.pdf