Home DIY - The Wonderful World of iPod battery replacement

by Graham Email

For some time I have been aware of a deterioration in the play time of my iPod. When new it had a playback time between recharges of over 10 hours.
It reached the point in January this year where I was barely getting 2 hours of playback time, which is not even sufficient to keep me going on a flight to Washington DC, which is where my current client is located.
Side Note – I made an interesting discovery on one of the flights to DC. I normally get an exit row seat on those flights, since a 35 inch inseam and standard coach legroom are not a good fit. I also had taken to placing my ipod on a ledge that runs along the door about 1 foot above the ground, to get it out of my lap, pockets or desk.
What I discovered was a sudden crash during playback where the battery status would plunge in a matter of minutes from almost full to “Please connect charger”. I assumed that the battery was now really bad; however, when I picked up the Ipod to examine it, I found that the case was freezing cold (and I mean COLD),. The door was cold-soaked and the Ipod had cooled to about freezing. This will negatively impact any battery, since batteries are a chemical device. Sure enough, after 10 minutes between my legs, the Ipod battery level was back to (not quite) full. It still didn’t stop the iPod from failing 30 minutes later with battery exhaustion, but I did get another 30 minutes of playback time.
There are lots of companies who will replace iPod batteries for a fee if you send the device away. However, I decided that, given the plethora of YouTube DIY videos showing how easy it really is to dismantle and replace everything in your iPod, it was time to try that myself. The battery for an iPod is only $7 if you buy it online, and there are companies that sell the battery and a kit of tools to open the iPod.
So…I ordered a battery replacement kit online, and waited for it to show up, while watching Youtube videos where grown men speaking in resonant well-modulated voices opened iPods seemingly without effort, disgorging the (very tightly packaged) contents.
However, I soon discovered by listening to the details that my iPod would not be as simple to open. I have a 160Gb 7th Generation version, which is very tightly packaged. It has a single platter disk drive (instead of the dual platter drives in 5th and 6th Gen iPods) which allowed Apple to make the case even slimmer. However, this also complicates case opening, since they also shrank down the case retaining clips.
The kit of parts arrived, so I set aside an evening to open the iPod. Surely this would be a matter of a few minutes and I would have the device open before my eyes.
Fat chance.
After an hour of wrestling with the case and making next to no impact, I moved on to other things.
Second try – same outcome.
At this point I watched other videos, including one where a man with a collection of Exacto-knives seemingly was able to undo a 7th generation iPod in a matter of only 2 minutes and 40 seconds or thereabouts. Aha! This was the silver bullet, the panacea. With a collection of Exacto-knives I would be transformed from a bumbling fool into a mighty colossus of the home workbench, vanquishing iPods and sundry other devices Just Like That.
I snapped into action and visited Harbor Freight, which as engineers and DIY geeks know, functions as an Aladdin’s Cave for many tools. I smacked down the ATM card and marched out with the world’s largest collection of Exacto knives. This was the ticket to instant iPod opening.
Well, as it turned out, No.
The guy’s Exacto knives in his video must have been made from kryptonite or unobtanium, because when I tried to use them to separate the casing from the iPod chassis, the clips would unclip and then snap back into place. The knife blades were not rigid enough to hold the case away from the chassis. After 40 minutes of this, with my sense of humor rapidly disappearing, I called it a night.
2 days later, I was back at it again. Up until this point I had been working carefully to prevent any damage to the sides and back of the iPod. However, urgency overrode elegance, so I picked up the most heavy duty tool from the original iPod battery kit, and set to work with that one, prising the sides of the case away from the iPod body.
Success! After 10 minutes of small-scale wrestling, I pulled the case back off the iPod, revealing the inside contents. There was some minor scuffing damage to the iPod front case, but not noticeable unless you are really examining the device.
Once you get the case back off, replacing the battery is actually relatively easy, as long as you have tweezers to pull and replace the battery connection cable to the motherboard. Snapping the case back on is also easy, as long as you make sure that you have un-bent any bent clips. Apple never really designed the iPod to be worked on in this way (remember the brouhaha when people originally wanted to replace the battery, and Apple became all threaty about voided warranties and issued “don’t do this at home” injunctions?), so the retaining clips on the back cover tend to become splayed when you pull the casing off, and they need to be bent back into place. If you keep removing the case, I suspect that the clips will rapidly suffer fatigue failure.
However, after 30 minutes wrestling to get the case apart, I replaced the battery in 10 minutes and had the case snapped back together in 2 minutes.
Success! After charging the battery for 2 hours, I ran the iPod for a total of 6 hours on 2 flights to DC and in the evenings on the road, and it was still showing 80% charge. A hell of a lot better than 2 hours.
Conclusions
1. This is not for everybody. It is at the limit of my DIY skills. However, my iPod is the most difficult to dismantle because it is the most tightly packaged.
2. those YouTube videos showing effortless mastery of iPod opening are somewhat like those fishing programs that one sees on TV. You know the ones…”Fishing with Ted”, where Ted is on a boat in the ocean, staring at the camera. He says something like “Hello, Ted here…we are in the Pacific Ocean, where I am going to fish for halibut”. You then immediately see him with his rod bent double as he wrestles with, and then lands, a fish the size of a small dining table. What you don’t see is all of the footage of the screw-ups, 2 days of fishing with no results, foul-hooking of seabirds and boat rigging, and sundry other SNAFUs. So…those 4 minutes of YouTube video? They were probably condensed from several hours of wrestling and swearing…