Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Contributed by reader BuckNut.

The battery in my two year old, first generation iPod started to lose capacity after 18 months. It held less and less of a charge until it finally would run about half an hour before failure. My choices were to send it to Apple for $99 and receive a refurbished iPod in return or try to replace the battery myself. After some quick checking I found that replacement batteries ranged from around $20 to $50. This seemed like a better option to me than sending it to Apple for a couple of reasons. First, I am cheap. The cost of the new battery would be significantly less if I did it myself. Second, I have always been into tinkering with electronics, cars or whetever else I could take apart and this seemed like a good challenge. However, the plan of replacing the iPod battery myself introduced an element of risk over sending it to Apple. Would it be worth the savings to crack it open myself? I decided to find out.

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