Um. iPods have off/on switches? Mine doesn't... If I leave it stopped for a minute or two it goes into sleep mode, and if I leave it alone for a few days it powers itself down. It boots up again (showing the Apple logo for a while) when I press the centre button of the touch wheel. What you describe as a vulcan nerve pinch sounds like the low-level force-reboot option, and I suspect yours had positively crashed in order to require that.

Nah, you were entirely right. That's the "Hard reset" switch. iPods don't really have off and on, they just have "on" "hardware hibernate" and "ran out of battery". If you needed to nerve-pinch it, it'd crashed hard enough to break the suspend mode, which is quite rare.

I'm still confused about what's going on. My model of a suspend mode is that when you apply power, the hardware becomes active, and then restores its state from some saved location. So if the saved state is crashed or hung or some such, you won't end up with a correctly running machine, but you should still be able to tell the difference between "does not power on at all" (hardware trouble) and "powers on but then restores to a crashed state" (needs proper reboot). The iPod gave me no feedback at all to distinguish the two cases!

I see several candidates for "expected attributes of a standby mode":

• Power consumption drops to almost nil.
  
• Device shows few or no signs of life, even when stimulated through the control surface.
  
• Upon coming out of standby, the device exhibits some kind of "reboot" characteristic, with non-persistent state reset to defaults.
  
• The reboot will recover if the system has crashed.

Of these, it's only the last that the iPod lacks — presumably because Apple's hubris leads them to expect that iPods crashing will be such a rare event that the user doesn't need an obvious way to recover. The reason it lacks it is presumably that standby is governed by the normal software running in some ultra-low-power-consumption mode rather than a separate microcontroller akin to those on PC mainboards.

To be marginally fair to Apple, if you'd phoned them up and asked for a warranty replacement they'd probably have told you about the nerve-pinch. (-8

I admit I didn't get round to actually looking up the length of warranty, but I'd be surprised if it were still in force over three years after I bought the iPod. So the question is not whether they'd have told me about the nerve pinch in order to save themselves the cost of repair or replacement; it's whether they'd have told me in order to save me that cost :-)

Well, if it's over three years old it's clearly obsolete technology. You should bin it and buy an iPad 3-D.

Sounds like the ebook reader I got for Christmas last year. It claimed to have enough battery life to read War and Peace five times, but I was finding it only had enough to read one short novel once. Turned out that when I thought I was turning it off between uses, I was actually just suspending it and it was still using lots of power. The actual off function, the one you have to use in order to make the marketing claim true, is buried several levels deep in an "Advanced Settings" menu.

That seems particularly silly because there isn't any obvious advantage to the vendor in making you use the battery up faster! If they were the only supplier of replacement (non-rechargeable) batteries, you could imagine how they might find it advantageous to suck you in with promises of long battery life and then squeeze you for every drop of juice they could make you consume. <f/x: grinding of tortured metaphors> But unless they're in league with the electricity company, that doesn't seem to work as an explanation.

I strongly suspect that the decision to make it sleep rather than switch off was based on how long it takes to come back from sleep (and what state it retains), and was made by marketing.

I've not used an ipod, but to echo what the other people said, it seems that most people would be happy to call what it does when you press the apparently-off button "off", and not have thought further. I'm always confused by things that don't expect a need for hard-hard.

I'm also irrisistably reminded of Jurassic Park (I may have made this joke before):

- OK, where's the off switch?
- Right here, next to the computer
- CLICK
- OK, where's the reset switch?
- Um. Under the raptor pen.
- *rolleyes* Crap.

At the point where my iPod controls raptors, I'll demand a proper off switch.

While the "hibernate" mode has a battery life of hundreds of hours, I'm happy with current behaviour.

On the contrary. If my iPod controlled raptors, I'd want a UPS!

An ipod that controlled raptors would be pretty cool :)

I should specify that, contrary to how it sounded, the way most people think is not necessarily inferior to the way I think. By default, I instinctively assume it is, but there's no actual evidence that eletronics that works the way it did 15 years ago is superior to electronics which is reliable and userfriendly, and a reasonable interpretation would be that it isn't :)

(That is, what you said. But it always _happens_ to bug me, for no objective reason except a nagging feeling that it's not really under control and it'll end up biting me in some way later, even if in almost all ways its lots better. However, I suspect Simon will feel the same way.)

Currently my portable music player is some kind of defence against those occasional people who yell offensive things at random women in the street, of whom Sheffield has quite a few. If an ipod controlled raptors sufficiently to make them not eat me or my shopping, I'd so buy it.

The £30 Sony Walkman mp3 thingy my mum gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago has this as its most prominent features. Also up there are:
-Insufficient storage space
-Nonexistent random play mode; takes 20 songs from entire collection in a random order and loops them over and over in that order
-First thing you hear about near-dead battery is when it goes "boooop" in your ear and dies mid-journey
-What is this thing ogg?
-Requires secret mystic sequence of keypresses to acknowledge newly loaded songs; does not recognise tag information from Linux about 80% of the time, so you have to look in the "Unknown Artist" folder. This would be less the case if I used the automatic uploader, but then none of my music would work, since I ripped it all off CDs and it would go "umm I'm telling of you".
-If you put your hand in your pocket, you press a button and it skips the song
-When the temperature is below freezing and the humidity is non-zero, it fails to respond to any command unless you put it in your mouth and warm it up.

However: I can turn it off.

I mislaid my phone last night, so shall have to call you tonight, which could be a bit complicated what with me going to meet feanelwa from work and you presumably going to geek-night.

Heading south tomorrow evening, whatever the weather :)

I expect to leave for the Carlton a bit after 8, so if you can ring before then then I should be in. (It sounds as if you've already got my number?)

indeed, I Have your Number o_O

*sets reminder on phone*