Over the past few days I’ve learned more about Apple‘s iPod than I ever wanted to know. Pam’s 60 GB Classic, while in the throes of a low battery condition, suddenly became unrecognizable to her Windows laptop. Not limited to her laptop, every PC in the house reacted to the USB attachment of the slick, black box identically: New hardware found! Your new hardware is ready to use! Unrecognized device! The reaction of the Windows XP Device Manager is quite predictable. It reports no driver for the unrecognized device. Other than the fact that it can’t communicate with the rest of the world, the iPod does everything else quite normally.

You might guess that each manufacturer finger-points at the other, and you would be quite correct. Apple suggests doing everything – including re-installing the OS – to the Windows box. And Microsoft suggests replacing the defective device.

So, a troubleshooting we go! Reboot the laptop. (No change.) Reset the iPod. (No change.) Try another cable. (No change.) Clean all of the connectors and treat ’em with Stabilant. Re-load iTunes. (No change.) Set the iPod to ‘disk mode’. (No change.) Run the built-in diagnostics on the iPod. (Possibly interesting stuff to us geeks, lots of cryptic numbers, but no change.) Drain the iPod’s battery to the point that it is completely unresponsive to the rest of the world, wait another day, charge it up. (No change, it even remembered what time it was, maybe I should have waited a month.) Try another Windows box. (No change.) And another. (No change.) And yet another, this time with the fresh install of iTunes and the Updater from the original CD that came with the device. (No change.) Oh, yes, the ‘five Rs’ were all tried. Except for the final R – Restore. You see, you can’t restore without a connection, and if you need to restore in order to get a connection you’re in a Catch-22 situation.

I found it interesting that the Web holds no shortage of people describing similar problems with iPods of all flavors, but not a single solution. Well, none that I found, anyway.

Apple’s Web site suggests a visit to the Genius Bar – Jobs must have come up with that name when he was feeling particularly arrogant. And so yesterday Pam and me and the troubled iPod traipsed off to one of the local Apple stores. The store was busy when we arrived. I was duly ignored. The staff with their colorful shirts embroidered with witty sayings, the hordes of well-dressed hipsters milling about, chatting and brandishing their AmEx cards, and me – shaven head, chains, denim, biker boots. After waiting patiently for what felt like an appropriate amount of time I asserted myself to the staff.

I explained the problem and the guy made the expected suggestions. All tried. He soon admitted he knew little about the products he sold. In one breath the guy said there was nothing to be done, but in the next breath he told me to make an appointment with a tech – they would diagnose it and/or make it right in 20 minutes max.

That’s where things stand today. I’ve got an appointment for Monday, late morning. It’s too bad I couldn’t get one for Sunday. If I did I already had my first question ready: “If you’re such a genius then how come you have to work Sundays? I’m no genius, but I don’t work Sundays”

I’ve got a couple of observations before I sign off. I’ve never seen a USB port go bad, and if iPod’s USB port has gone tits-up it’ll be the first. It’ll also be the first such device I’ve encountered that didn’t have a way to hard-reset itself to a brand new, out-of-the-shrinkwrap state. Heck, I do it to my TV every now and again, and I even reset my truck (an F-150) once. It may not be easy to find the correct control-alt-meta-cokebottle sequence to do it, but it can be found and it can be done. Apparently, not so with an iPod. If it turns out that I need to replace Pam’s iPod, I’ll pick it up wholesale (I’m in the business) and choose one priced to be as disposable as it seems to be, expecting to replace it yet again relatively soon. The 8 GB Nano seems a likely candidate. I may even consider moving her to another platform. That would mean excising the DRM junk from her library of purchased music, a topic for another day.

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