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

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

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.

[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.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

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.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

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.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

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.

[sunflowerinrain.livejournal.com]

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 :)