I received another kind donation at my store recently, a couple of old school hard drive based iPods! They had both been well-loved and well-used, I gave them both a damn good clean and proceeded to pull them apart to assess them.

The first was one of the venerable 3rd Gen with a failing hard drive and dead battery. The tiny internal plastic frame from around the dock connector had snapped, which I removed and carefully glued it back together.

The other was a 5th Gen where the battery had swollen and killed the LCD. I know that scenario is the cause of the “black spot” curse that a lot of the iPod nano models suffer from, but I’d not seen it happen on this model previously. Unfortunately the replacement LCD I’d had for years in my spare parts collection turned out to have some odd blotches after I swapped it in, most likely due to flexing or pressure at some point, so I have another replacement on order. The original 30GB hard drive surprisingly passed a surface scan, which is great news.

All in all, great to work on these two, I fixed so many iPods 2003-2007 that it really did bring back memories :)

Currently listening: Total Science Volume 2 (1996)