Joe Lamantia.com

When Good Firmware Goes Bad

I've loved my shiny new iPod since November of last year, when I gave in to an acute case of technolust and bought the 40GB model. Six months on, despite the entry cost, the inability of Apple products to live happily in a PC universe without loads of expensive accessories, and the disconcerting set of scratches that appeared on the display almost immediately, I'd still say I was very happy.

That is until last week. Apparently, while I was running a standard firmware update (to the 4/28/04 release), the basic file system on my iPod became corrupted without warning, and everything on the pod was -- erased. *38 GB* of all sorts of personally and professionally important files evaporated without so much as an unhappy face...

As it so happens, I was planning to wipe and rebuild anyway, so I've decided to look at this incident as an example of pre-emptive self-cleansing on the part of an exceptionally eager to please iPod, instead of a catastrophic file system failure.

But I'm still pissed. I have strong memories of using a Mac at a design studio in '99, and deciding that I should wear a helmet to work because it crashed so often. This reminds me of that in a more personal and equally frustrating way.

And it's going to cost Apple some money, to boot. I just decided that I'd replace my aging Dell laptop with a tasty new Powerbook - and now I think I'll be buying something else. Great design and marketing don't make up for unreliability.

local tags: apple, ipod, ux