iPod Repair

You’ve broken your iPod and you want to know what you should do next, here’s a rough guide on where to start:

1. If your iPod doesn’t hold it’s charge any more you more than likely need a new battery. Your choices are:
a. Buy a new battery for your iPod and fit it yourself using one of our guides here. Cost = less than £20.
b. Send your iPod off to an iPod repair company to have a replacement battery fitted. Cost £30-£40

2. If you have the “Sad face” icon on your screen, chances are there is a problem with the hard drive on your iPod. Choices are:
a. Send your iPod off to an iPod repair company to have a replacement hard drive fitted. Cost £50-£90.
b. Buy a replacement hard drive for your iPod and have a go at fitting it yourself. See our guides here for fitting instructions. Cost £30-70.
c. Buy a repair guide here that shows you how to fix the problem without replacing the hard drive. Cost around £12.

3. You have cracked the screen on your iPod and an inky fluid is leaking into the screen (but your iPod still shows up in iTunes and functions ok).
a. A replacement screen for your iPod is pretty easy to fit. The hardest part is getting your iPod open. Once you’ve done that you can replace your own screen with a few simple tools. If you have an iPod Nano you may have more difficulty Taking it apart than other models, but it can be done if you’re careful.
b. Any decent iPod repair company will charge you around £20-£40 for a replacement screen.

4. You dropped your iPod in water and it’s stopped working.
a. In all honesty there is little you can do to repair your own iPod if you drop it in water. You are far better sending into an iPod repair company to see if it is salvagable. Chances are the water will have done too much damage to make a repair to your iPod worthwhile.
b. Send your iPod into Apple if you are still within warranty. They won’t repair it, but will offer you a decent discount on a new iPod.

If your iPod is more than 2 years old and breaks, do you send your iPod for repair or just throw it away and buy a new one.

Apple usually want to charge you almost as much as a new iPod to do the simplest repair. This even includes replacing the battery. This is either because, being a large organisation, it apparently can’t do your iPod repair any cheaper because it has thousands of staff to support, or it sees it as a good revenue stream.

The other point of view on this however, is that being the manufacturer, they want to sell you a new iPod, not repair your old one. This keeps their iPod production facility busy and makes lots of profit. It’s in their interest to take your old iPod out of circulation rather than to repair it.

But it’s in your interest to get your iPod repaired, here’s why:

1. Money! Plain and simple, you can usually get an iPod repair made for less than £40 for most common repairs. That’s a fraction of the cost of a new iPod.

2. The environment. Your iPod may only be small, but if hundreds of thousands of iPods break down every year (which they do), then that’s a lot of landfill full of broken iPods.

3. Contamination. All iPods (as well as other rechargeable electronic devices) contain Lithium Ion batteries. These are full of harmful chemicals which leach into out water supply over time if we just bury them in the ground. They need to be carefully recycled and disposed of on a safe fashion.

4. Time. It’s quicker to send your iPod to an iPod repair company than to send it back to Apple. Average turnround is 3 days for an iPod repair company, weeks if it goes to Apple.

5. Unemployment. There’s a whole industry grown up around iPod repair and iPod parts. If everyone suddenly stopped repairing their iPods and bought a brand new one each time, thousands of people who earn their living doing iPod repair would be out of work.

So, do the right thing, save yourself a bundle, and do your bit for the environment too. Get your iPod repaired and don’t buy a new one unless you need to.

If you’re lucky enough to own a 1st generation iPod (the first ever iPod made in 2000), then chances are that you’ll need to carry out a repair at some point.

This particular iPod is the easiest iPod to repair as the components are larger and there are fewer of them.

The main obstacle you will come across is getting hold of the parts for a 1st or 2nd generation iPod.

There are a few companies still selling spares but you’ll find most of the iPod repair companies will no longer repair older 1st and 2nd gen iPods.

Take a look at the guides on this site and figure out if you feel confident carrying out your own iPod repair. It’s probably your best chance of keeping your vintage iPod in tip top condition and working well.

Although the capacities on these iPods is small (only 5Gb or 10Gb), the hard drives seem to be very robust and less prone to failure than a 4th gen iPod where hard drive replacement is common.

Replacing the battery in a 1st gen iPod is very easy. It sits on top of the hard drive and is the first thing you see when you open the iPod up. You simply unplug the old battery, plug in the new one and close the iPod, it’s quite possibly the simplest iPod repair there is.

Take a look at our downloadable guides for making other repairs on a 1st or 2nd generation iPod.

Repairing an iPod can be difficult. In general the charges from iPod repair companies are a fair reflection of both the work and level of skill involved.

Not every repair is difficult however.

There are many simple repairs that require nothing more than a few basic tools, but can save you a fortune. Take for instance changing the battery in an iPod 5th generation video. Not strictly an iPod ‘repair’ more a replacement, or swapping out of a component.

If you send your iPod off to Apple to have a replacement battery fitted, it can cost almost as much as a new iPod. It pays then to learn how to do it yourself.

If you have an iPod classic then changing the battery is quite simple.
Take a look in the iPod 5th gen category to get a step by step guide for this one.

The most important tool to get your hands on, is a pry tool to be able to get your iPod open. These are simple to use and do the job very well without damaging your iPod.

Generally if you’re just fitting a replacement battery in your iPod, then you won’t need any further tools. If however, you’re repairing your iPod or replacing another component such as the LCD sceen, then there are a couple of other tools you’ll need.

Of you have an iPod Mini or Nano, then you’ll need a very small Phillips screwdriver and matching flat blade screwdriver. If you need to repair an iPod classic then you’ll need the same.

If you’re doing the job properly (especially when replacing the hard drive), then you’ll also want to use an ESD mat, which prevents damage to your iPod through static electricity. This isn’t necessary but is certainly preferable.

So if you fancy carrying out an iPod repair yourself, take a look at some of the videos and step by step lessons to find out how.

So you’ve just got your iPod back from the repair company, complete with it’s replacement battery. Excellent!

But is all as you would expect? For a start, is the battery they have put onto your iPod really brand new? Well you’d like to think so wouldn’t you. On the whole most iPod replacement batteries are actually brand new. For hard drives and other components however, it’s a very different story.

Most iPod repair centres use new parts in all their repairs. After all, they can be bought very cheaply now from the far east. iPod hard drives however, still remain very expensive.

Because of this there are quite a few iPod repair companies around who will recycle parts from a broken iPod and fit them as ‘new’ into your beloved iPod Classic or Mini. They find it cheaper to buy an iPod with a broken screen and take the hard drive from it. This is then fitted into your iPod as a ‘new’ hard drive. It’s hard to detect unless you know how to open an iPod and how to tell the difference.

So it pays to check with the iPod repair company you are thinking of using, that they fit brand new parts and will guarantee them against failure for 12 months. Get them to confirm via email the all parts they use in their iPod repair are new. Do this and you’re covered if ever it turns out later that they used recycled parts.