How silly

[simont]

It turns out my iPod wasn't defunct after all. It just needed turning back on!

Apparently, for the last three and a half years, every single time I thought I was turning it off or on, I was in fact putting it in and out of a state more akin to a laptop's ‘suspend’ function. On Monday it took it into its head, for reasons unexplained, to power itself off properly, which meant that pressing what I thought was the On button but was actually the Unsuspend button did nothing. To actually turn it on, one has to apply a Vulcan nerve pinch to two particular buttons and hold it for eight seconds, whereupon it spends a minute or so booting up before being willing to do anything.

I thought Apple were supposed to be masters of creating computing devices that a non-expert could use. If you can't even find the on switch without looking on the Internet, something is wrong!

(Unless, I suppose, any non-expert would have known to do that immediately, and I only failed to because my mind was too highly trained?)

Comments

[aquarionical.livejournal.com]

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.

[simont]

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!

[gerald_duck]

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

[simont]

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 :-)

[gerald_duck]

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