I was looking on the apple refurb store for a new ipod for my birthday, and i saw that 30gb black ipod was £143. I know that its expected for a new ipod to scratch, but is it a good idea to buy a one refurbished?

refurbished stuff is usually as good as buying it brand new although you dont usually get a 12 month warrenty (some dont come with any warrenty). You could just buy a brand new one for £30/£40 more from amazon/play/ebuyer

all of apples refurbs come with a years guarantee, but i dont know if i will have enough for a brand new one, so if the quailty is said to be good, ill go with the refurb.

All Apple refurbished stuff comes with a standard 12 warranty as far as i know.

Yeah, the quality is good, my old iPod were replaced with a refurb and it looked brand new!

Wow, that sounds good telly_man! but would a 30gb be worth the price to replace a 1gb nano?

i'd say so.

I've got a 30gig white one, and it's brilliant.

Ok, ill proboly get one then, but 2 questions for you, how fast does the battery die when playing video, and i was using my mates, and i noticed that you could feel the whole ipod kind of vibrating inside when a video is opened, does yours do that?

I think it's about 3.5/4hrs for playback, and no, it doesn't vibrate!

Battery life for ipod playing video is (a rather poor) 2 hours.

4 hours .... lol ..... you wish!

2 hours? ouch, oh well, if i do get one, i wont be using it for entire movies.

Well, to be fair, with a bit of fannying around, you can maybe squeeze a shade over three hours out of it. But, you'll have to sacrifice quality to get it.

http://plasticbugs.com/?p=305#battery

(Also, as it's a re-furb you're looking at, does that mean the battery could quite possibly have seen a bit of previous usage? Which I would imagine could only have a negative effect on the playback time on the unit)

If you want a portable to play video, an ipod is not the one to go for.

I think that the battery gets replaced in refurbed ipods, but you have the applecare with it, which will replace the battery if its not a decent one.

If you get a refurb you will need to buy a wall charger. They don't come with one anymore. I bought my son an iPod mini from Apple's refurb store and it had to be charged with the wall charger and not the USB port before it would work. When it came it had one tiny scratch on the cover - a lot less than my Nano has despite being looked after. I think you save 35% by buying refurbs and you do get a guarantee. No iPod box though.

Ive already got the apple wall plug, and dont mind if it doesnt come in the original box, so everything should be ok with getting one.

I'm happy with the one I got my son. He's had no problems and it was much cheaper than buying a second hand one on Ebay. They go fast though so good luck.

Does anybody think the ipod will come with the free case?

my ipod clickwheel has stopped working - apparantly this happens on quite a few of them. does this mean i can get mine 'refurbished' (i.e. get it fixed properly by apple).

Depends, how old is the ipod?

Should do!

As said above, how old is the iPod? and what model is it?

The clickwheel isn't repairable, nor replaceable. The entire iPod fascia needs to be changed.

its a 4th generation one (20Gb)


everything works fine apart from the wheel - the bottom half will not work at all, the top half works some of the time.


so it looks like my only option is to get a new one? grrrr.!