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Random Chat / Re: The Thread of Extreme Happiness
« on: January 22, 2021, 08:11:17 PM »I'm kind of thinking of grabbing a beat up 4th/5th gen and restoring one of those just for the fun of it.
So I did this and hoo boy, did I get an interesting specimen.
DankPods has a video entitled "Don't fall for this scam!" where he examines a "new" "in-box" iPod Video (5th gen). Here it is, for reference:
The one I ordered is one of them and it ticks all the boxes. Weird pixelated box art and the cheap replacement shell on the unit itself. The main difference is that the one I ended up with is most definitely second-hand. The case is pretty scuffed up, so it probably got a lot of love.
Originally I figured that only the front shell was replaced, since the serial number on the back matches the one in the unit itself and has the correct drive capacity etched in. After playing with mine for a bit, I noticed one big discrepancy. There are two distinct iPod Video hardware revisions, dubbed "5th generation" and "5.5th generation." The 5th generation came with either a 30GB or 60GB hard drive, while the 5.5th generation came with either a 30GB or 80GB drive. There is one very notable difference in the operating system, however: mine has a search feature. Only the 5.5th gen had that!
I looked up the serial number and found out that the iPod's motherboard is actually from a 30GB 5.5th gen! Kinda seems like the people passing those refurbs off as genuine new products just put together whatever they could using the parts they had available. But, wait a sec. The back of the case has a matching serial number and capacity. It really seems like the group that did this really pulled out the stops to ensure that it would look as much like the genuine article as possible, including laser etching their own back shells.
Good thing they did such a bad job on the box and polycarbonate front, then, huh?
All that being said, I did sync it up and have been playing music through it for the past hour or so. I'm going to be pretty much replacing everything that the refurbishers did anyway, so as long as the guts are good I'm happy with it. Sucks that the person I bought it from probably grabbed the carrot and wound up getting scammed, though. At a distance or from online photos it would have been really hard to tell this apart from the genuine article.